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Performance
"What is it that flows between us?" A spoken word performance. Hamburg, 2004.
What is it that Flows Between Us?
Storytelling from Shadow Cities
A spoken work performance by
cybermohalla
11 and 12 March, 2004
Hamburg, Germany
Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin,
"Storytelling is the art of repeating stories. Experience which is passed from mouth to mouth, in the speech of the many nameless storytellers, is the source from which all storytellers have drawn. Stories - fairy tales, legends, novellas - emerge from the oral and flow into it. Drawing from experience - his own, or that reported by others - a storyteller makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. When the rhythm of work siezes the listener, her listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling comes to him all by itself. The storyteller is never alone..."
A 16 member team from Cybermohalla was invited by Kuntswerk and HAJUSOM! for an International Theatre Festival, Play Mas. The storytelling performance by the team was a retelling of the written texts from the labs.
Read the stories
English | German | Spanish
See images from the performance.
A short video of the storytelling performance will be available soon.
SCRATCH BOOK
The Storytelling Festival was also an occasion to be in the midst of other storytellers from different parts of the world. We carried with us to this context a compendium of our practices at Cybermohalla, to share them with others, in the form of a "Scratch Book": a register of notes, annals, journals, manuals, annotations, commentaries, conversations, suggestions, reflections, indexes and scrap books.
Read about the Scratch Book and download it here.
TEMPORARY MEDIA LAB
Stories surround us. They wait to be inscribed, to be picked up, to travel to different destinations, to find themselves in different biographies, to be in circulation. We are all creators, producers of knowledge. All we need are contexts where we can search ways to tell our stories, share our experiences, spaces where every thought and utterance will be nurtured, friendships that are combative. Our experience has been that this requires sustained relationships, practices over long durations and a space for experiementation and play. We constantly search occasions to set up micro-contexts for creativity, where browsers can be editors, users can be producers, listeners can be composers.
The Play Mas Festival was one such occasion for us. Here, in the workshop/performance space, the Cybermohalla team set up a Temporary Media Lab, to invite different participants to share ideas and stories, create works and contribute to, and become part of a network of knowledge production.
The Temporary Media Lab was a significant space for us, and for the festival. While we were certain of this while conceptualising the lab, this became more apparent after the workshop began. The lab give the CM team a space tocontinue with and share its everyday practice. But also, the inauguration of the festival with an invitation to all participants to inscribe with their stories, images, fragments and sounds by building a relational field, seemed to give the festival an interesting orientation. The most popular tools are pens and papers. The location of the lab - on a prominent stage with a projection screen in the background - gave it a central and significant presence in the festival.
Cybermohalla practitioners invited all the participants to the media lab, on the opening day of the workshop. Read what they said here.