What is Performance Art? Why not a tradtional play?

Heike Pfingsten works with the room and the material. These will inspire the young students to create their own performance. The audience won't be passive but an active part of the paly on the last day of the workshop.

On the first day the students create a network with the red-white tape.The tape can be used as a barrier but also as a network which can support the humans.

The lightest of the participants, Cindy, could be carried with the new network of our red white tape.

Heike uses the tape to change the huge classroom and the next day the students are inspired by the new look of the room.

The students take different materials like torches, gloves, lamps, stamps and create different spaces in the classroom. The colleagues try to enter and move in the different spaces.

One group create a space called Border. The migrants are checked, get a new ID are allowed to pass or sent back.

Onother group create a Comfort Zone. The migrants are lucky to be there! They get tea and water, friendly people are talking with them.

Another space is the Police Office. Which language are they speaking? The Germans can not understand Polish or Turkish. It is creepy. 

One group create the long way of Migration. The people don't know the way through the jungle, the administration, the country. Everywhere are people who check me, talk to me in foreign languages, are unfriendly, sometimes friendly. But why?

The last day of the workshop we invite two groups of students who don't know anything about our performance or ideas. They are the migrants without knowing this. The performaer guide them in the now closed classroom, check them, send thema back, to the comfort zone (the luckiest ones) or to the zone of discomfort. Sometimes they understand what they have to do but mostly they do not understand.

Later the visitors describe their impressions: "This was a confusing situation. It was terrible in the police station when you do not understand the language!"

Performance art: to be touched by a foreign and unknown situation. But it is only art not real. The performance includes the audience, they are an active part of the creative work and they get another idea of the reality.