1997 Performance Training at the Saar Academy of Fine Arts

von Ulrike Rosenbach
by Prof. Ulrike Rosenbach for the Catalogue of the European Media Art Festival Osnabrück 1997

During the twenty-five years of my personal involvement in performance, I have compiled an abundance of structures and exercises which I have used in my own training. The result today is a wide-ranging seminar program forming the substance of the “performance and creative training" course which the students at the academy can participate in.
In the mid-1970s I began testing the function and sequence of these structures in my old studio in Cologne in co-operation with the group "Schule für kreativen Feminismus" (School for Creative Feminism). This led me to spend years studying integration training and meditation techniques. This was an important prerequisite for my very intensive performance work in the 1980's, when I began to work in particular with certain forms of improvisation.
At the time of my appointment as Professor at the Saar Academy of Fine Arts in 1989, the wealth of knowledge about training development and structures relating to improvisation motivated me to start the "Performance Creative Training Course".
The complete "performance training" course takes up one whole day a week. Each morning it starts with an hour of light yoga and stretching exercises related to the day's agenda. At 2 p.m. the actual 2-hour training begins. The day concludes with meditation exercises which develop out of the day's program. All the physical exercises involved are very much aimed at the beginners’ level; the program is not meant as a round of physical and mental gymnastics. The training takes place in the lovely surroundings of an attic studio at the academy and provides a welcome change from the otherwise non-body-friendly work done at the video machine, computer, or easel. Several generations of students have passed through my hands over the course of time, not all of them from the media classes; some also hail from the art, sculpture, or even design departments of the Academy.
There is no requirement to conclude these seminars with a performance work or a comparable action. For some participants the weekly training session is simply important for relaxation, or to enable them to learn more about their own development process, which can be further reflected on through their own work in the studio, in the form of pictures or drawings. The three exercise sets, yoga/stretching, performance training and meditation, are meant as light but effective forms of integration training in the best sense of the word. The integration of body, mind and spirit helps in recognizing and accepting the creative processes. Grasping their own inherent body/mind state is the first step which beginners take in these seminars. The second important step in the training is to accept the inherent, personal body/mind states as “one’s own world”. Between these two phases there is a series of key obstacles and obstructions. Fear and a lack of trust often hinder the move towards acceptance. In many exercise sequences in body-improvisation, the trust in one’s own individual physical and mental capacity is developed and reinforced, while overcoming fear enables participants to move more freely and to identify materials and media through which they can fulfill their own artistic process of development. The acceptance of one’s own nature is strengthened, enabling students to approach their work with more authenticity and ultimately with more imagination. Now development focuses on "individual themes" rather than just technical processes in imitated form. The development towards authenticity in the artistic process and the decision for personal themes is soon made tangible by the work done in performance seminars, but it does remain very intense for the student. The speed and intensity with which the recognition of individual, authentic processes of development grows leads at times to new stumbling blocks along the way. Opposition to these new insights can intensify and need to be reprocessed through individual initiative. Thus, performance work in this training develops into a kind of spiral movement within which the themes "fear and mistrust" occasionally predominate. Recognizing this as an issue of its own is one of the most important steps made over the course of time. Thus, the third step is overcoming, openness and the will to recognize and use individual strengths – and to translate them into artistic action, whether through performance action or other techniques.
The following passage relates to the performance "Re-cordis: Remember - Giving Back through the Heart”, which was performed at the European Media Art Festival 1997 in Osnabrück:
Nearly all the students staging performance work in Osnabrück this year are familiar with other artistic techniques such as video, sound, sculpture and painting.
In 10 semesters of study with me, Beate Kercher has developed her own voice as a crucial, authentic and artistic tool. This development makes her the most unusual of the young artists to develop out of what is after all an artistic course of study at the Saar Academy of Fine Arts. I believe that only the academy’s extraordinary willingness to experiment has made such a development possible.
Christiane Hommelsheim has combined her vocal gifts and her love of the theatre with the development of sound-objects and video productions, which puts her, like Gertrud Riethmüller, into the broader sphere of staged space occupied with plastic objects and performance-based processes whose themes can be drawn from literary models, texts and narratives.
Waltraud Höfinger is developing strongly towards ambitions evocative of dance-theatre, which, very much like Klaudia Stoll, develop in slow, repetitive time sequences as improvisations in space. As with Gabriele Pichler, and with the same intensity, the performance training has had a very intensive influence here, with its structures for improvised movement. Gabriele Pichler makes the development and presentation of individual strengths and energies into a theme for spatial choreography. By contrast, Jacqueline Wachall, the painter in the group, uses bodily processes and colors for her concepts, while Ingrid Mwangi has chosen her own ethnic roots as the theme of her performance.
The degree of personal commitment is great. Performance means total concentration on the here and now, while integrating the intrinsic atmosphere of the movement into the development of bodily processes. All participating students involve themselves in this process with a great degree of personal energy. The task of developing and performing these abilities in front of an audience of strangers means stepping outside the confines of the academy and taking a step beyond performance training.

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