Ritual für (den) einen Mittelpunkt
'ritual for the (one) center' — Performance Art Award Switzerland
jury report — Dorothea Rust «Ritual für (den) einen Mittelpunkt»
Dorothea Rust (born 1955) lives and works in Zurich. She studied postmodern dance in New York, as well as visual Art and Cultural / Gender Studies in Zurich. Her artistic work has been awarded, among others, with the work year awards of Zug and Zurich, the Performance Promotion Prize of the Kunstkredit Basel (2007) and the Recognition Prize of the STEO Foundation. www.dorothearust.ch, www.unterricht.dorothearust.ch
In front of a covered climbing wall on the recreational area*, two square areas were marked out with black tape and a row of basil potted plants were used as a stage. The blind artist is led to the right square and left there. Not a patch of skin is visible. A hooded jacket fastener reaching over her head takes away her sight, gloves clothe her hands. As companions she laces two red buoys - used to moor watercraft or to mark the position of anchors - to her waistband with long ropes. Thus the performer begins her "ritual for (the) one center".
With a lecture on the healing power and significance of basil, she draws a connection to the origin of the plant name, the local canton of Basel-Landschaft and its geographical centre. In the meantime, the propellers of a flying object start to turn on the left square, the drone takes off and floats. In order to remain comprehensible to the audience in addition to this aircraft noise, the performer now shouts and screams her knowledge into the room. Calls for orientation, which she has long since lost - in search of a stack of prepared cardboards, tangled in the cords of her anchor buoys. A game begins in the back and forth. Cardboards with explanations of drones, central points or simply covered with symbols and images of rural events are thrown into the audience. The audience has just given directions to help, and now protects and ducks in front of the cardboard bullets. Thus the artist draws tracks of meaning into the room, which immediately dissolve again.
All these small bullets lie in the recreational area* and the centre of the earth can be reached via a tunnel. The mobile phones are to be placed on the table, the basil leaves picked, rubbed between the fingers, smelled and then placed on the phones. All this is important, yes! Important for the ritual. Thus the artist undresses, piece by piece, down to her underpants, only to expose a body, which in turn, covered by black lines, begins to act in a new coordinate system. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues. The drone watches over her head and lets her hair flutter in the wind.
The jury was impressed by the way the artist allowed the placement of a center to melt away in the space between a two or majority, and celebrated the ritual announced in the title as a hybrid anti-ritual. The course of the performance remained situational and uncertain, audience expectations were built up and dropped. The work of an experienced and versatile artist thus manifested itself with its very own character and wit.
The jury appreciated the ambivalent eccentricity as well as the simultaneous fluidity and resistance of the work. The performer showed a variety of settings in which she created seemingly unsolvable situations, sought and found ways out of them. With this permanent spectrum of imponderables and discontinuities, Dorothea Rust offered a performance full of radical turns, in which she skilfully oscillated between humour and seriousness.
The artist was awarded prize money of CHF 30'000.
(* recreational area of a school building complex in Lupsingen, where the Performance Art Award competition took place)
juryreport ... www.performanceartaward.ch
the Swiss Performance Art Award
ist eine partnerschaftliche Förderaktivität der Kantone Aargau, Basel-Landschaft, Basel-Stadt, Luzern, Zürich und der Stadt Genf. Der gesamtschweizerisch ausgeschriebene Wettbewerb will der Performancekunst eine adäquate Plattform bieten und sie einer breiten Öffentlichkeit näher bringen. Deshalb planen die Kulturförderinstitutionen jährlich einen Anlass, an dem Live-Performances öffentlich gezeigt, besprochen, beurteilt und ausgezeichnet werden.
s a partnership-based promotional activity of the cantons of Aargau, Basel-Landschaft, Basel-Stadt, Lucerne, Zurich and the city of Geneva. The competition, which is open to the whole of Switzerland, aims to provide an adequate platform for performance art and bring it closer to a broad public. For this reason, the cultural promotion institutions plan an annual event at which live performances are publicly shown, discussed, judged and awarded prizes.
Conditions for participation Performance Art Award Switzerland 2016:
The Performance Prize 2016 will be held in the canton of Basel-Landschaft. The venue is the municipality of Lupsingen. Lupsingen is the geographical centre of the canton, which was the decisive motive for holding the Performance Art Award at this location. The event (all performances) will take place outdoors, regardless of the weather conditions. This must be taken into account when submitting entries.
The Performance Art Award 2016 is organised by kulturelles.bl and financed by the Swisslos Fund Basel-Landschaft.
The competition: will be held in two stages. Artists are invited to apply electronically with an artistic documentation by Wednesday, 2 March 2016 (24:00 h CET). From these applications, the jury will select a maximum of seven artists (or groups of artists) who will present a current performance in the outdoor space in Lupsingen BL on Saturday, 20 August 2016. Based on these performances, the jury will award the Performance Art Award Switzerland.
The performance event: On Saturday, 20 August 2016 in Lupsingen BL, the selected artists will perform a performance developed especially for the event or a current performance. This will be shown outdoors, regardless of the weather conditions. The artists will receive compensation of CHF 3,000. They are responsible (in consultation with the organiser) for setting up (on the day of the presentation), technology, installation and dismantling of the infrastructure of their performance as well as for its financing.