IN TRANSIT - Transforming the Arts

With IN TRANSIT, the Berlin House of World Cultures is developing a completely new type of festival for the 21st Century at the level of intercultural dialogue. The process oriented series of events, conceived as an on-going laboratory, focuses not on finished products but on encounters between 130 performance artists, musicians, theatre and video artists from Africa, Asia, the Arab world, Europe and The Americas. Writers, critics, curators and dramaturges will support the participating artists in their travels between the worlds.

IN TRANSIT seeks to negotiate the existing cultural perception in Europe, proposing alternative models. Today cultural divergence and diversity are considered the key potential for the future development of the arts. Clear-cut geographical, gender, and biographical boundaries have already shifted. An ineluctable process of transformation is shaping globalised societies worldwide. The singular once-and-for-all membership of a given culture has given way to a plurality of cultural spaces in which individuals can readily move.

IN TRANSIT does not present a finished product with final answers but asks questions: What can art be in the 21st century? What is the divide between art and politics? What forms need to be developed? Can an absolutely contemporary artistic language emerge only if concrete experiences of life, political, social, spiritual, and ritual contexts are included in cultural contexts? Where are the limits to this concept? How do we want to live together with people from other cultures? Do we see our future in a nationally determined culture or in the encounter with cultures that embrace the challenge of international change? What does accepting this challenge mean in practice?

In the search for new orientations in the arts and culture of the 21st century, IN TRANSIT wants to provide a common platform, an experimental arena where artists and spectators can be both actors and spectators. Ideally, the festival will also be a forum for a new, sensitive globalisation-expressed in concrete artistic and cultural exchanges in Berlin.

Intercultural dialogue in the context of IN TRANSIT will be in the hands of curators-artists from Asia, Africa, Latin American and the Middle East. Their specific situations in life, their concomitant cultural perspectives and hence their creative methodologies guide the choice of participating artists.

IN TRANSIT is no longer a purely German enterprise but a dialogistic project between two cultural spaces. After cooperative projects like "Translated Acts" and "Short Century" in 2001, the House of World Cultures is thus for the first time breaking completely new ground by largely relinquishing curatorial responsibility.

The chief focus is on the encounter of artists from different cultural contexts and with extremely divergent biographies, with backgrounds in urban or ritual, marginal or politically drastic conditions. In lectures, discussions, workshops, and performances they will be searching together for new forms of artistic expression between tradition and contemporary art.

IN TRANSIT seeks to sharpen the perception of cultural differences and possible commonalities in addressing concepts like "tradition", "modern age", the "other". The still widespread attitude towards works of art from other cultures as being "exotic" is to be exploded. Ideally, a "laboratory for life" will come into being whose spirit and horizon transcend the performing arts.

The public will be witness to this creative process. They can participate in the conquest of new spaces, in laboratories and workshops, in club events and street performances. At the same time, they will be able to attend conventional evening events, finished productions. Nevertheless, IN TRANSIT also calls in question the classical form of international festivals. Instead of product presentation, the focus is on work in progress generated by intercultural dialogue, and on long-term communication and cooperation between cultures.

Curator of the festival is - as in 2002 - Ong Keng Sen, director of "TheatreWorks" in Singapore. He is known in Germany primarily from his production of "King Lear" performed at the Berlin "Theater der Welt" festival in 1999. His partner at the Berlin House of World Cultures is the artistic director of the Programme Department Music, Dance, Theatre, Johannes Odenthal. [top]