Go to gate

go to gate  - was a reality-based performance-installation that took place in the experimental musictheatre PLEX in the centre of Copenhagen in February 2008.

The subject was what we called the “anxiety-industrial complex” - the huge economies that had emerged after 9/11. To make all the impacts of these industries alive we had turned the entire theatre into a make-shift airport where the audience would move through all the rituals of air-travelling from deciding on a destination via security checks and an entire transit lounge with bar, bookstore, computergames, a psychologist giving courses to fight your fear of flying, shops to purchase insurances as well as prayer-rooms where you could meet up with a professional of most of the big religions.

Being a docu-installation with 60 real-life professionals as live performers it was a concept that made a big leap from theatre-fiction and representation into contemporary art.

Created by Lene Juhl, Mark Viktov, Sanne Bjerg, Adelaide Bentzon and composers and soundartists : Rune Søchting , Tobias Trier, Ture Larsen, Johanna Maj Thorning, Anne Marqvardsen, Jørgen Teller, Magnus Olsen Majmon, Aida Nadeem og Karsten Fundal

go to gate – was a game-based performance-installation letting audiences enact first-person encounters with live representatives rather than representations of life.

go to gate  - was an inclusive exploration of the interactive field of contemporary public spaces.

go to gate  - was a knowledge-and information-based first-life game about fear that did not intend to scare but to inform us on the culture and politics of fear.

go to gate  - was a framing for numerous subjective voyages through the landscapes of fear as presented by contemporary media and politics.

go to gate  - was a catalyst for debate. By activating the personal experience of each visitor, go to gate intended to spark an intensely involved debate about feelings and reflections on the culture of fear – based on subjective experiences and moderated by a focus but not a solution.

go to gate  - was an example of a multi-linear art-form that allowed for multiple interpretations. Hereby form becomes a clear reflection of content  – as participants of the game were continuously be confronted with the dilemma of freedom versus control. Since there was no central-perspective or linear story-line but only a clearly defined space of possibilities, each participant was forced to take his or her own course – this was not a go to fate as traditional theatre, nor a go-go gate of passive entertainment

Your life is your choice – but everything you do is framed by a series of interactions where you constantly have to balance your need for freedom with your need for safety.

go to gate  - was aimed not so much at making us feel fear, as rather to recall feelings of fear – and by doing so reflecting on the mechanisms of fear. By juxtaposing interactions one-on-one with documentary material on global aspects of the issue, go to gate  activated a number of neural connections between private and political angles.

go to gate  - was an installation where hyper-realism met the unbelievable.

go to gate  - was a performance-installation where the fore-grounding of real-life professionals created a physicality, a presence, an indelible sense of fullness, of multi-dimensionality of characters. The presence in the space could never be the same without the fabric and texture that emanated from a body embodying nothing but itself, its own full self – with the entire burden and glory of the full story and stories of this particular individual. The WYSIWYG-experience that you got from this had an enormous impact on your sense of reality and interaction when you left the installation and re-entered “the real world”.

The presence of this full chorus of true stories – not so much the private stories, as the individual experiences of real life interaction – made a unique link between the general and global story and the individual and local story that each participant was charting for him or herself throughout the duration of his or her stay in the installation.

go to gate  - a concept for a post-traumatic theatre….