Their life is made up of a host of languages. Lola Arias is Argentine, Stefan Kaegi is Swiss and lives in Berlin. They work all around the world, speak English, German, Spanish and French and like to hold discussions in Portuguese, the language of their first show together, of their encounter, in São Paulo, for Chacara paraiso (2006), a project with policemen with what policemen wish to express. Stefan Kaegi is, with Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, a founding member of Rimini Protokoll, a Berlin theatre collective that practices “art trafficking”, blending reality and representation: in Kreuzworträtsel Boxenstopp (2000), four ladies in their eighties became Formula 1 experts and researchers in high speed; with Shooting Bourbaki (2002), five teenagers from Lucerne shared their ballistic knowledge and pleasure in pistol shooting; in Deadline (2003), five doctors recounted their approaches to death; and in Mnemopark, in Avignon (2006), five pensioners who are model enthusiasts, and a young actress in charge of a switching station revisited eternal Switzerland through miniature trains. Lola Arias is an author, director and performer. In Buenos Aires, she founded the Compañia Postnuclear, a group of artists from different disciplines with whom she staged several shows. Her latest creation, which is a trilogy, Striptease, Rêve avec revolver (Dream with Revolver) and L'Amour est un franc-tireur (Love Is a Freeshooter), focuses on the tension between reality and fiction. Her works have been presented at several international festivals and her texts are translated into French, English and German. Airport Kids is their second joint show. At the Festival d'Avignon, Stefan Kaegi / Rimini Protokoll presented Mnemopark and Cargo Sofia-Avignon in 2006.
They are called “nomad children”, “portable children”, “mobile children”, they travel from one country to another but they feel like they are in the same place, they are bilingual or trilingual, have two or three passports, credit cards, instant messaging, connected friends everywhere and a diplomatic vocabulary. The director of an international school refers to them as “children of a third culture”, neither local (birthplace) nor national (the host country), but global and intimate at the same time, which all of them share in the world and which however is specific only to them. Stefan Kaegi and Lola Arias met them near Lausanne where the head offices of multinational companies brought them together, often for just a few months, before their parents were transferred elsewhere. The two artists also met foreign children who arrived from the third world, new refugees, adopted, abandoned, who mixed with the expatriate's children. During a workshop, children from 8 to 14 years old were chosen who came from India, Morocco, Brazil, China, Romania, Russia and Angola. For a few months, Stefan Kaegi and Lola Arias invented stories and scenes with them, based on their nomadic life and the crossings of their cultures, languages and imaginations, fertilized by ultra-modern communication techniques.
These are short, collective formats, sometimes sung, often shared through image, video and electronic and digital connections, that are presented in boxes (cardboard, aluminium) in which each individual recreates his own world. Hidden, isolated, in transit at certain moments; open, generous, inventive at others, these children are especially looking for a compass so that they can glimpse a future world that they imagine is nearly already behind them. They are post-modern children, sorcerer's apprentices who are frightening because of their instantaneous blend of innocence and technological knowledge, but who keep in themselves, however, inexhaustible reserves of utopia.
Distribution
mise en scène: Lola Arias et Stefan Kaegi
avec des “nomades mondiaux” âgés de 8 à 14 ans: Oussama Braun, Patrick Bruttin, Julien Ho, Kristina Kovalevskaya, Aline Lidia de Mello Morais, Clyde Philippoz, Sarah Serafim (distribution en cours)
dramaturgie: Florian Malzacher
scénographie et lumières: Dominic Huber
musique: Stéphane Vecchione
vidéo: Bruno Deville
assistants: Fabienne Rossier, Boris Brüderlin
production déléguée: Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne
Production
coproduction: Festival d'Avignon, Hebbel-am-Ufer (Berlin), Theater Chur
avec le soutien de: Pour-cent culturel Migros