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The MOBILE ACADEMY BERLIN
is the successor of the international Theatre Academy Ruhr that
was held in Bochum in 1999, and has now been moved to Berlin with
a new thematic focus. The model of the Academy combines interdisciplinary
course work with fieldwork, theory and activism. The MOBILE ACADEMY
not only teaches techniques and methods of actual art production,
but also experiments with strategies to avoid art and artistry:
Learning always means to confront ones own prejudices.
Fake Lore - Who's That Girl?
In the 1960s, Fake Lore was an American "battle
cry" employed field-specifically in a scholarly controversy
ABOUT true folklore, the "real stuff". Fakelore meant
fake folklore. Hard to say what the "real stuff" ever
was; deep in provincial Hesse, the Brothers Grimm discovered and
wrote down the genuinely illiterate woman's oral narrations of
fairy tales. Although it soon came out that this was actually
a well-read, upper-crust lady whose native tongue was French,
the myth of Grimm's Fairy Tales as a German folk national monument
remained uncontradicted. Current research is more concerned with
the production, the societal function, and the acquisition rituals
of folklore, and that means asking whose nostalgic expectations
and wishes attribute credibility to a particular cultural expression
- despite constantly quoting, faking, and copying cultural forms.
We regard the band Kraftwerk as the real German folklore!
Let's define fakelore for the Mobile Academy as
an urban, synthetic construct made of invented traditions, counterfeited
and cobbled together, often of short duration, and needed to generate
urban identity: An urban folklore in the societal gap between
the normality of everyday culture and nationalistic pathos, between
ethnic identity and the ideologization and mystification of the
Other.
In teaching sessions, practical tasks, field research, activities,
and presentations, the Academy will investigate some of the critically
lacerated slogans that we associate with fakelore: identity, authenticity,
collective authorship, national values, and handicrafts, and travestize
them in an (artistic) operable process. The result will be dramatic
scenes, musical performances, advertisements, staged tours of
the city, video clips, radio plays, and interventions in the urban
space.
A lecture program delves into the mystification of formerly revolutionary
movements as patriotic pop folklore, the return of apocalyptic
biblical visual worlds in contemporary representations of war,
the influence of voodoo culture on American pop culture, the cultivation
of the mythos of traditional trademarks like Mercedes Benz in
India and Africa, and the recycling of tribal symbols in mass-produced
Nigerian video soaps. The program offerings include group visits
to performances and artists' studios, as well as tours of the
city that focus on the topic of homeland/outland, especially conceived
for the students and conducted by experts on Berlin. The site
of the Academy is the Hebbel am Ufer, an "international theater-combine
in Kreuzberg district that opens itself up to urban reality and
creates space for the modes of expression of the various national
communities". The Mobile Academy is an international meeting
place and network, a camp, and an actionistic concept operating
in the city. About 150 participants comprise a temporary "imagined
community" that, in three weeks, will create an image of
itself and produce "real stuff".
Welcome to three weeks of work on useless solutions
for non- existent situations!
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