andcompany&Co
andcompany&Co. take history personally. History, herstory, our story.
As tireless space travellers through past and future ideologies, theories and utopias, they fight the present’s attack on the rest of time. Behind Walter Benjamin’s angel, they sweep up the shards and stick the fragments back together in prisms that refract the big Cs of the epochs: communism, capitalism, colonialism. Always with the inferred autobiographical question in mind: isn’t everything political?
Founding & Co.
The collective andcompany&Co. was established in 2003 in Frankfurt am Main. It was founded by theatremaker and -scientist, author and performer Alexander Karschnia, theatre-maker, author and performer Nicola Nord, and musician, performer and composer Sascha Sulimma. In the spirit of its founding ideas, they create their work collaboratively with all members, co-directing, co-writing and co-producing the pieces. National and international artists from various disciplines that andcompany&Co. regularly collaborate with also become equal co-combatants in the projects they are involved with. Now based at the HAU in Berlin, the collective’s creative network is therefore continually growing. This includes Flemish director and author Joachim Robbrecht, visual artists Noah Fischer and Jan Brokof, musicians Reinier van Houdt and Simon Lenski, among many others.
From Lennon to Lenin, from Marx to May
The andcompany&Co. principle really blossomed with its 2006 breakthrough performance “little red (play): ‘herstory’” (invited for example to the Wiener Festwochen and kunstenfestivaldesarts). This play tells the fable of futuristic pioneer, little red, a time-traveller with a red helmet who presses the rewind button and travels back to the beginning of socialist utopias. The end of history? The start of the story! The production, which was developed for the Freischwimmer Festival, is the first part of a “Trilogy of Reunions with the Twentieth Century”, continued by “TIME REPUBLIC“ (world premiere Steirischer Herbst 2007) and concluding with “Mausoleum Buffo“, which was invited to the Impulse Festival in 2009. These are works that dig around in the dumps of ideologies and the second-hand markets of pop culture. No great mental leaps are required to take a journey from Lennon to Lenin, from Karl Marx to Karl May, from dictators to Disney. The links and loops are openly revealed. The endless repeating of history with a new face or costume is a fact, but not an inevitable fate.
The remix as reality principle
In this process, the themes suggest the method: remix, sample, copy&paste, collage. Pop theatre? Rather pop modernity as it is. The remix principle is borrowed from a reality that constantly plays cover versions of revolutions and their collapses. Sampling allows us to hear the basic melody that underlies everything in different chord variations. The space this resonates in is a Europe where East and West do not meet as antagonists, but an ideological prairie where they smoke a peace joint together. For example: “West in Peace – Der letzte Sommer der Indianer“ (West in Peace – The Last Summer of the Native American Indians; 2009). andcompany&Co. look both in the rear-view mirror and straight ahead, finding kindred spirits in all camps and times. Like Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, dissed by Goethe and an outsider of Weimar gossip circles. And Bernward Vesper, son of a Nazi poet on the fringes of the Red Army Faction and author of the feverish “Reise” (Journey) – two stormers and stressers of artistic failure who may not originate from the same time, but were united in the convolutions of “Pandämonium Germanicum“ (2011).
Seizing the canon – Müller smokes Brecht
As graduates of the Frankfurt School of thought, andcompany&Co assert their very own text tradition and seize the canon with postdramatic means. Both Bert Old Brecht and Heiner “the Visionary” Müller are among their favoured classics. For their production of Brecht’s “Fatzer” fragment, andcompany&Co. travelled to São Paulo in 2010. Their version, renamed “Fatzerbraz” – relieved of quite a number of its lessons and combined with Carlos Marighella’s “Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla” – is brought back to life in contemporary Latin America with Brazilian performers. In a place where a whole theatre tradition was set alight by Brecht’s cigar and the word ‘revolution’ has not yet become an empty buzzword. V-effect or victory sign? Why bother splitting dialectical hairs.
Speaking of Heiner Müller. As philosophical father of revolutionary, counter-revolutionary and counter-counterrevolutionary discourse, he appears in a number of andcompany productions. Such as the performance “SHOWTIME: trial & terror” (2008), which took his “Hamletmaschine” literally and gave it a spin on history’s wheel of fortune. Most recently, he inspired the collective to create the lecture-concert “2045: Müller in Metropolis” for the Heiner Müller! Festival at the HAU (2016). A séance about the possibility of humans becoming machines, with bonus immortality, which would finally fulfil Müller’s dictum of “total occupation by the present”. Welcome to circular logic.
andcompany unplugged
Lecture concerts are andcompany&Co.’s second main performance arm and their favoured strategy against performative monoculture. They are also a welcome space to test out discursive bonus material, which surfaces onto the user interface of reality. With “Der Flucht der Minerva: Die Schlaflosigkeit der Vernunft gebiert Ungeheuer” (Minerva’s Curse: The Sleeplessness of Reason Produces Monsters; developed in 2014 for the Volksbühne conference As Darkness Falls: Theory & Practice of Self-Empowerment in the Age of Digital Control), they follow Hegel into the jungle of surveillance. Into the daybreak, where security-obsessed society can’t get a wink of sleep for all the dawn light. For andcompany&Co., this was their first exploration of the theme of digital worlds and digital diets. They continued this expedition in 2015, with their theatrical data-mountain climb “Archipel Google: Big Dada Revue”, journeying right into the arms of the big, big bytes octopus. And questioning the most famous search corporation in the world. Is Google God? Do you see better through smart glasses? This subversive business trip began in the Theater Neumarkt in Zurich, aka the real Mountain View.
Borderless echoes
Since its inception, andcompany&Co. has not restricted itself with borders and has occupied the theatre space as internationalists with open horizons. The independent theatre scene is not seen as a fortress, but as a dock open to all sides. Institutions, models and formats are often chosen to form temporary alliances. For the Deutsches Theater Göttingen, andcompany&Co. adapted the films “Wir Wunderkinder” (“Wunderkinder”, 2011) and “Zur Sache, Schätzen” (“Zur Sache!”, 2013). “Der (kommende) Aufstand nach Friedrich Schiller” (The (Coming) Insurrection after Friedrich Schiller) was co-produced with the Oldenburgisches Staatstheater in 2013 and took andcompany&Co. to Amsterdam for this German-Dutch collaboration. There, they rehearsed with Flemish theatre-maker Joachim Robbrecht and other protagonists involved in the opstand. At the crossroads of history, the recent political prophecy written by the “Invisible Committee” meets Schiller’s “Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande” (History of the Decline of the United Netherlands) from 1788, Occupy choruses reverberate in “Don Carlos”, right-wing, populist cultural funding cuts are echoed in the protest songs of the new Geuzen: beggars.
Facing white, one step further
With “Black Bismarck” (2013) – including the lecture that preceded it, “Black Bismarck previsited”, (Foreign Affairs Festival 2012) – andcompany&Co.’s political theatre gains a new focus and urgency. The two main themes usually addressed in their work, communism and capitalism, are joined by the not yet therapeutically dealt with issue of colonialism. In “Black Bismarck”, andcompany&Co. make a connection between the Berlin Africa Conference of 1884/1885, which resulted in the mass displacement and genocide of African people, to the present, to the Berlin streets named after violent German colonialists like Adolph Lügenfritz and Carl “Hangman” Peters. Facing white, one step further: defeat colonialism in your head, while everyone from the Iron Chancellor Bismarck to the Lone Chancellor Merkel searches for the ultimate solution. And at the same time, Europe tries to defend itself against floods it has actually caused itself.
Orpheus or where the head sings
Taking the next logical step, andcompany&Co. set off for today’s borders, which are also always yesterday’s, with “Orpheus in der Oberwelt: Eine Schlepperoper” (Orpheus in the Land of the Living: A Smuggler’s Opera; 2014). A journey to the river Evros, which today keeps refugees from reaching Europe and in Thracian times carried Orpheus’ loudly singing head in its currents after he had been torn apart by the Erinnyes. Musically reinforced by Monteverdi and Gluck, the audience visits more than one fortress guarded by the Cerberus Frontex on this European excursus on power and suffering. It also sheds some light on the character of the smuggler, an enigmatic companion, halfway between a crook and a helper. There’s no room for fear on this journey. Although fear currently seems to be the order of the day. Something that Nord, Karschnia, Sulimma & Co. take along as a central theme on their next journey, arguing backwards and returning home in the production “Warpop Mixtake Fakebook Volxfuck Peace Off! Schland of Confusion” (2015). A German angst revue exploring both images of collapse from the 1980s and the trembling of today’s patriotic Europeans.
In the costumes of revolutions past
In all these processes, andcompany&Co. of course also remix themselves. The compulsion to cross reference history inevitably resurfaces in their own work. The search for meanings and borders in “Orpheus”, for example, followed on from the production “europe an alien” from 2005 (Forum Freies Theater Düsseldorf). An early play of its time – or just ahead of its time? Regardless of this, andcompany&Co. continue their work on history’s short-circuits. The “Smuggler’s Opera” will be followed by “Everybody Comes To Stay!” (premiere at Junges Schauspiel Düsseldorf in April 2017) – also the story of political escape, albeit exile in reverse. “Warpop” will be followed by “Angie O” (premiere at the HAU in November 2016), an examination of revolutions loosely based on Brecht’s “Saint Joan of the Stockyards”. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of numerous revolutions more inquiries of revolutions between Berlin and Brussels will follow. The wheel continues to turn. And revolutionaries will continue to enter the stage wearing the costumes of revolutions past.