Bring a Friend - Christiane ou la Maison

A few years ago, Quentin Lannes found a pile of photos from the interwar period at a flea market that repeatedly showed the same young woman and her family in front of a large house. Using a programme that is able to determine the location of a photo even without a geo-tag, he went in search of the place and the identity of those pictured. The history of this investigation bears witness to the circulation of analogue photographs in space and time, parallel to the spread of digital images on the internet.

Within «Bring a Friend», we are also showing the video «The unauthorized portrait of F. the man who wanted to live forever» in the Festival Club at Grosse Halle. It is about F., who records his memories and feature on an internet platform for posterity. 

Quentin Lannes lives in Lyon, where he works at the Digital Research Unit of the Fine Arts School. In his work, he investigates the digital and analogue traces that we knowingly or unknowingly leave behind.

Bring a Friend - A curational experiment

The crux of festival curation is (among other things) to keep a good balance between new discoveries and established groups and productions that are already touring from festival to festival in the international scene. Both - and of course the large field in between - have their place in a programme, and the mixture of both is what makes a festival like auawirleben. Finding new groups is not always easy. At the end of the day, it’s easiest to watch what is promoted by other festival directors or theatre directors. Gatekeepers serve gatekeepers.
At the same time, we increasingly feel the desire to work with ‘our’ artists in a broader and more sustainable way than simply inviting them to perform, they arrive and leave straight afterwards. We want to know more about them and their environment, and in turn we want to be more open with them about our processes of festival making.
We have combined the two concerns and asked three of our invited groups to nominate artists for our programme who are from their own local context and who have not toured much internationally. We call this format «Bring a Friend» because we don't want to hide the fact that personal connections often play a role in the theatre business. So, this year you will find three exciting young productions from Tallinn, Madrid and Lyon in the programme. Quentin Lannes was nominated for it by Simon Senn (Geneva).

We will show all three «Bring a Friend» productions on Tuesday 10 May and conclude with an audience discussion at Grosse Halle, where the nominating artists will also be present (moderated by Mathias Bremgartner).

You have two options for the «Bring a Friend» evening:

Course A
17:00 For your nirvana
18:00 No Gatekeeper Party at the Festival Centre Waisenhausplatz
19:00 Christiane ou la Maison
19:45 dinner at Grosse Halle (not included in the ticket)
21:00 Jinete último Reino Frag. 2
22:15 talk

Course B
18:00 No Gatekeeper Party at the Festival Centre Waisenhausplatz
19:00 Christiane ou la Maison
19:45 For your nirvana
21:00 Jinete último Reino Frag. 2
22:15 talk

There will be two additional performances of For your nirvana on MO 9.5. as the audience number is limited.