IN TRANSIT 04: The festival

Koffi Kôkô and Johannes Odenthal

IN TRANSIT 04 aims at creating a space where outside views can transform the traditions of western modernity in the performance arts.

What is art at the dawn of the 21st century?
What roles do Europe and Germany play as one of the world's locations for culture and art?
Is contemporary dance theatre the urban ritual of modern society?
What can the body teach us?
Can there be Enlightenment through the body?
Is the theatre a stage for political change?
Are art and culture the new fields of politics?
What is traditional and what is modern?
How has modernity coined art in post-colonial cultures?
How can we simultaneously conceive of modernity as global exploitation and artistic emancipation, as a force for suppression and democracy?
How have works by artists in the Arab, Black African, or East Asian world been influenced not only by political awakening, but also by censorship and suppression?
What utopias are depicted in artists' narratives?
Where do we find stories of happiness?
What do bodies remember?
Where have the dancers and artists derived the power for emancipation and resistance?

IN TRANSIT designates a radical change in perspective.
The periphery becomes the centre.
Opening up to the other is a basic precept.
The 21st century belongs to the new centres: China, Brazil, India, Japan, Mexico, South Africa.
The structure of relations is changing at an incredible speed.
Europe's economic and political dominance has become permanently relativised.
European art and culture are not strongholds of the avant-garde.
National, religious, and ethnic borders run directly across main western European cities.
Cultural identity becomes performative.
Theatre, as an experimental space for social and individual developments, is regaining its political significance.

+++ Art is politics. Politics is change. Change is Enlightenment. Enlightenment is art. Art is politics. +++