A presentation by Kai Tuchmann
Do you still remember?”
German theatre director Heiner Mueller considered this question the most crucial of all questions, when it comes to this unique assembly, we call theatre. During this assembly the act of memory is a permanently contested site, where the temporalities of the past, present and future, intersect.
Central to Kai`s presentation is the notion of afterlife- as developed by Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg. A notion, that once turned to the realm of theatre, implies, that the theatrical repetitions of the past affirm the capacity of quotations to expand our being beyond the limits of a “homogenous and empty time”- Walter Benjamin.
Post the forty minute talk Kai Tuchmann and Anuja Ghosalkar will be conversation with journalist Kunal Purohit on the the changing idea of evidence gathering and the blurring lines between fact and fiction. When evidence can be manufactured, can artists uphold their own agency while dealing with truth claims associated with it, especially in countries like India, China and Germany? At a time when social media is curating our everyday reality with "Alternative Facts" and Deep Fakes, how must documentary theatre making respond to it?
This talk is presented in association with DramaQueen Theatre Company and Harkat Studios.
About Kai Tuchmann:
Kai Tuchmann is a German director & dramaturg. He has directed for several influential German Theatres like Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin, German National Theatre Weimar and was the head Dramaturg of Mainfranken Theater Wuerzburg. But it was his work with people and artists in Palestine, Sudan and Iraq that Kai discovered the potentials of amateurism, collaborative script developments and documentary techniques. Since 2013 Kai refined his interest in these practices through regular collaborations with independent Chinese Theatre groups. His collaborations with Shanghai based Grass Stage were invited to prestigious Chinese Theatre festival in Wuzhen as well as shortlisted for Berliner Theaterfreffens 's Stueckemarkt. Red, a collaboration with Beijing based Living Dance Studio, toured Europe (Theaterspektakel Zurich, Festival d`Automne à Paris), Asia (I Dance Hong Kong) and USA (Asia Society New York). Kai teaches at Beijing Central Academy of Drama, Frankfurt's University of Music and Performing Arts and at the Marvin Carlson Theatre Centre in Shanghai and New York.
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