Gintersdorfer/Klassen
In Monika Gintersdorfer and Knut Klassen's universe, there are several planets, a few satellites and a star that organizes the revolution of all of them. Since 2004, Monika Gintersdorfer and Knut Klassen have been gravitating around this energy and solar centre that is the show business milieu of Ivory Coast and its Parisian and German diaspora. She was initially a director in the major German national theatres; he is a plastic artist. Together, they have invented a spontaneous and free collaboration, stimulated by their mutual artistic independence. Light, reactive and iconoclastic, their theatre is inspired by concrete querying, artistic and economic survival strategies, political upheavals in Ivory Coast, and finds its language at the juncture of dance, theatre and the plastic arts, exploring a physical relationship to words. Their constellation of dancers, DJs and stars of coupé-décalé and Abidjan nightlife shares the stage with German performers, choreographers and dancers - two poles of radically different existences and aesthetics, the glamor and virtuosity of some vying with the discursiveness and humour of others. This encounter has given rise to a stimulating confrontation of experiences, as in Very Very Strong (2009), or the narrative of a huge slice of Ivorian history that resonated with contemporaneous German politics, or in Othello, Who's He? (2009), which revisited a classic of Western theatre. Concerned with treating in the long run themes that are dear to them and that belong to the fields of politics, religion and show business, Gintersdorfer/Klassen favour producing series, which permits them to deepen artistic forms they have already experimented with. They are coming to the Festival d'Avignon for the first time.
MS, April 2013.