Community

A selection of current projects with and for different communities.

vielleicht_ regen_

vielleicht_regen_ is a group of artists who came together during the pandemic as part of a project with students from Wim Wenders Highschool to create pieces at the tanzhaus nrw. Theis aim is to provide a space for the unheard voices of the children and find artistic expression for the themes. The work revolve around the question “How are you doing in these strange times?”

Josep Caballero (choreography), Kamila Kurczewski (video art) and Fabian Schulz (sound design) developed a trilogy “Hey Du!” with 7 students in 2020, consisting of a film and two stage plays. Malin Speicher joined the collective as a set designer for the last production “wirunszufall”.

The collective involves young people from the outset in the artistic process. Through in-depth conversations, the themes that move children and teenagers are “uncovered”. Subsequently, the ideas are further “condensed”, initiating an artistic, multimedia process. The children and teenagers can approach the stage by experimenting with different media (body, set design, video and sound) and develop and stage the piece together with the collective.

Projects:

HEY DU! Der Film (2021)

Hey Du! Jetzt (2021)

Hey Du! Next (2022)

Wirunszufall (2023)

Hajusom

Hajusom is a performance group which has created numerous innovative formats with artists of different genres on topics such as globalization and transculturality, colonialism, migration and flight. Since 1999.

Throughout Hajusom’s history, a multitude of groundbreaking and award-winning formats have been developed by a permanent team and changing guest artists. Collective working methods have always been vital to this process.

Josep Caballero worked as guest choreographer with Hajusom since 2015 and he was co-leading the group with Ella Huck from 2021 to 2023.

Pandemic and future

Working during the pandemic:
A work with young people in Düsseldorf, whom I and my colleague Kamila Kurczewski have never met in an analogue way.

Do you have to be productive and guarantee choreographic group work to save the situation? No, I didn't feel like it. I concentrated more on individual rehearsals or conversations; first of all, to create a space in which everyone could express what was bothering him or her, what the challenges were that we were dealing with, both privately and artistically.
On this basis, we could decide individually and discuss together which questions we wanted to pursue. Each of us could individually prepare short videos to generate performative material. Over time, I saw that each of us, whether consciously or unconsciously, was confronted with his or her own privacy: What do I allow to appear on the screen of my private space? How do I deal with making myself public?

Although there was an attempt by some to avoid privacy, much was inscribed invisibly in the material. An uncontrollable energy or aura. The private and the public have intersected in an invisible way and formed an interesting amalgam. Without the influence of the private environment, this quality would not have been possible. A material very open in its intimacy and fragility emerged without having shared it with the others, without having created in a real space for it. The paradox of digital and proximity?

In these times when real closeness has been missed and romanticised, digital space has made its place. With the young people, we have definitely enabled a new access to ourselves and an opening to others - out of the question: What do you send from your private space, or how do you address the outside? Were we allowed to do that? To be continued!

The future?

I don't have a crystal ball to look into to predict the future. No idea!
I hope we won't see money cuts in culture. I don't hope that cuts will cause a lack of diversity of aesthetics and formats in culture, and a lack of solidarity - that competition will gain influence within the cultural scene. I hope that we will say: "We have learned something from history, we look differently at the conditions of our market and also take them on structurally." I don't hope that the next motto will be "Take ... what you can", because the topic is not particularly exciting and not exactly newsworthy!

Josep Caballero García