Tentative Assemby (the tent piece)
Direction by Eleanor Bauer
Choreography and performance by Eleanor Bauer, Cecilia Lisa Eliceche, Magali Caillet-Gajan, Michael Helland, Liz Kinoshita, Michiel Reynaert, Manon Santkin, Gabriel Schenker, and Adam Weig
Dramaturgy and choreographic assistance by Pierre Rubio
Music by Chris Peck
Scenography by Karel Burssens & Jeroen Verrecht / 88888
Lighting by Colin Legras
String figures specialist: Philip Noble
Production by GoodMove

Kunstenfestivaldesarts at Kaaitheater, May 4-7, 2012 (Brussels)
Göteborgs Dans & Teater Festival, May 20-21, 2012 (Gothenburg)
PACT Zollverein, February 8-9, 2013 (Essen)

“From start to finish and from studio to stage, choreography organizes relationships between people sharing a common space and time. Respecting the inherently political dimensions of this definition, Tentative Assembly (the tent piece) addresses choreography as politics in an attempt to understand and practice ways of being together through artistic inquiry. Today’s unit of measurement is the individual. With the conflation of capitalism and democracy in a globalized information age, people have never been more vastly networked and yet so atomized. Contemporary subjects form temporary groups, belonging to various different “communities” for precise and separate reasons. How, today, are individuals’ desires, capacities, and virtuosities mobilized towards shared knowledge and experience? How do we create material and immaterial commons that emerge from and support expanding horizons of independence? How do the autonomous assemblies characteristic of today’s multitude propose real and functional alternatives to the homogenizing term “the people”? In a world of conflicting values, beliefs, realities, truths, ideologies and world-views, we must consider pluralist ways in which to share this world with Others. Various resources and issues force us to consider cohabitants of a world that has become too small and with crises too large for neglecting, ignoring, or eliminating difference. In a moment of global unrest and political change, Tentative Assembly (the tent piece) brings together the intelligence and people-power of nine independent performing artists asking the question of how it is possible today to utter the word “we” and stand for it, as well as where and when we have no other choice. Absorbing political theory and current events into our methods of collaboration and performance, the practices developed in the studio are locked in dialogue with the world outside, by creating a common ground for imagining and insisting that another world is possible. Asking how we assemble today is also a question of where. In Tentative Assembly (the tent piece), the scenography materializes this very question, bringing the audience and performers together in various efforts to construct spaces within which to gather, structures that are not permanent but fragile and permeable, an expression of negotiation with changing circumstances of which they are a part. Tentative Assembly (the tent piece) is not a definitive answer to the world’s problems, but an invitation to the world’s problems, harnessing the theater as a space of potential and the performance as a meeting place and time in which to passionately exercise, question, fantasize, open up and develop matters of concern that can no longer be ignored.” – Eleanor Bauer, October 2011

Photos by Stanislav Dobak