Last night I visited the third night in a series of nine ‘crisis laboratorium’ events. The context is theatre, but it’s much than that. The Amsterdam Frascati Theatre made March 2009 the Month of Crisis. The series of event is called Crisis in Frascati. The reference here is obviously the credit crisis/economic recession. This time it is not theatre that is in crisis, and that in itself is a good sign. Finally, it’s society itself that falls apart, not this or that movement, medium or discipline.

Crisis in Frascati, which runs from March 13 till 27, 2009, looks like an informal workshop setting, a temporaray lab with a mix of lectures and reviews, performances, debates and screenings. It opened with a “Great Public Sale of Unrealized but Brilliant Idea, an auction of artistic concepts. You can read the reports here on their Crisis in Frascati blog where Dennis Molendijk is the special Crisis Reporter.

I went to the “Under the Skin” evening for two reasons. There was, first of all, the premiere of Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat’s new burqa project. I have been involved in this for a while now, advicing Karen, who is also doing this project as a practice-based PhD. You can see some of the picture of this performance here. The burqas are not yet wired. The ‘second skin’, developed at V_2 in Rotterdam, is not yet ready and will be fully operation in October 2009. Karen Lancel explained the purpose of the project and then the audience tried on the five or six burqas, just to get an idea. The artistic research question here deals with networked interactivity but the wider political issue is, of course, highly sensitive and is not only related to the position of Islam women in (Western) societies, but also with anonymity and invisibility in a electronic surveillance society. Let’s see how this project develops. It will be put to trail in various public spaces in Europe, and beyond.

The second reason was to see Andcompany&Co, who now live in Berlin, but were once based in Amsterdam. I got to know Alexander Karschnia ten years at Next Five Minutes 3 and we’ve been in contact ever since. Andcompany&Co is into post-Brechtian pre-DADA (or is it pre-Brechtian post-DADA?) political techno theatre, gaining expertise in what they call “unperformance”. This is on stage new media art. And speculative theory as well. Adilkno for Actors. A while ago I saw one of their longer plays, also here in Amsterdam, and they have been successful touring throughout Europe recently. During their short Crisis in Frascati ‘reading’ they fooled around with Marx, playing with a text by the German Krisis group, available here, in number of languages. “DaDa ist Da!” Greetings to all you Ueberfluessigen out there!