< Art Book < Antistatic 4, The new man

Antistatic 4
Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance

The new man

Gallery Raiko Alexiev
Sofia, 2011

Ligna present:
The new man

The New Man is a performance without actors and stage. There is nothing to see except for the activity of the visitors. They are listening to a radio play that not only deals with the four aesthe­tic positions mentioned above, but proposes gestures and movements according to the different blueprints of the new man. But the audience is not listening to the same things at the same time. It is split up into four groups. For fifteen minutes each group is listening to one of these posi­tions, then their program is changing and their role is transferred to another group. In the end every group of listeners will have tested and quoted every attitude. They play the same play four times with different roles, being actors and viewers at the same time. The New Man calls for turning the production of gestures and movements into a public, collective affair.
Duration: 60 min.

read more
Ligna exists since 1997. The group consists of the media- and and performance artists Ole Frahm, Michael Hueners and Torsten Michaelsen, who since the early nineties work at the Freies Sender Kombinat (FSK), a public non-profit radio station in Hamburg. Bi-weekly they provide a program called Lignas Music Box, which asks the listeners to call in and play their favorite songs via the telephone.  All works of LIGNA have in common, that they regard their audience as a collective of producers. In a temporary association it can produce unforseeable, uncontrollable effects, that challenge the regulation of a space.
One of Ligna’s models of media usage, the Radio Ballet (invented in 2002), provides radio listeners with a choreography of excluded and forbidden gestures in formerly public, now controlled spaces. Others are the Radio concert for 144 mobile phones, which lets the radio listeners participate in a process of collective composition, or The new Man, a theatre play without actors, which engages the audience in a complex gestural interaction.



Event views

Photography: Kolmar Studio (C) 2011