'I’m more trying to create situations rather than pieces'

The Swiss Christophe Meierhans is a musician, theatre director, performer, and he has even made films and exhibitions. One recurring theme in his work, however, is an investigation of the collective and the consequences of joining the collective. “If you’re discussing a real political issue in a play, why is it less real than when you do it outside?”

You are currently best known as a theatre director, but your artistic background actually started in music. How did your career develop to the performances you make now?

I was first planning to become a jazz guitarist, but due to tendinitis in both of my arms, that became extremely difficult. So I made a turn towards composition and I went to study contemporary classical music in Amsterdam and Berlin. At that time, composition was still considered a modernist project, embedded in old and dusty institutions, taught by the last generation of believers in the dying utopia of making the ‘new’ music. Much of that music seemed to be relevant only within these institutions and hardly had any exchange with the outside world. This was a huge contrast to the Berlin that I lived in from 1999.
By that time, Berlin was calling out for new and different institutions. It was also the end of the really crazy period and there were still all these empty spaces. There was this enthusiasm and hope that the city could become something completely different. There was the overall feeling of building up new things together. The nightlife and cultural scene were also still very participative. And all this was in sharp contrast to the conservatory, with its old teachers and dated ideas of what music theory and composition should be. It was clear for me that I wasn’t going to dwell in there for too long.

That is why I was very happy when a new seminar started at the University of the Arts, where I was studying, which brought architects and musicians together to investigate the relationships between sound and the constructed environment. This led me to do some first pieces in the public space. It was music, since I was working with musicians, but it wasn’t really a concert. In the project at Alexander Platz, for instance, twelve musicians were spread out. It was a kind of installation that lasted three years and in which musicians played composed pieces that sounded like scales or musical exercises. On the square, you never saw more than two of them at the same time. You could either pass by and miss the work or if you were more attentive, discover the whole orchestration bit by bit.

I continued being a musician for quite a while with the two-member band TAPE THAT, in which we composed and performed. We looked for a lot of different contexts: both contemporary music festivals and galleries, but also more punky venues. There was a very strong performative element in TAPE THAT. In addition to the purely musical qualities of the work, the visual aspect was very important. In one of the projects, which was called 'Catalogue', we would perform about sixty very short pieces during a concert. The time in between the pieces was longer than the pieces themselves and their titles were almost as important as the actual musical part.

It was in that same period that I started working in Brussels with Heike Langsdorf and Christoph Ragg, which later became C&H. In the beginning, I mostly took care of the musical and audio part in the collective, but we soon started co-conceiving and co-directing every aspect of the performances.

With C&H you especially worked in the public space. Your own work mostly takes place in the theatre. How did this transition happen?

With C&H we actually started in the theatre with work such as Bühnestuck. After that we moved out and did things in the public space. During the last years, we mostly worked on the project called Postcards from the Future, of which we did several versions. Everything we did in C&H was about this threshold between being aware that something is happening or not and creating a context in which it is not clear where you are supposed to look and what is part of the show and what is not.

In the beginning, we all had other projects in addition to C&H, but we ended up only doing that, as the work became more ambitious and increasingly time-consuming. After working together for ten years, we all felt like doing other things again, I guess.

Coming from music, my focus wasn’t immediately on theatre. I also tried to make films, as well as doing some exhibitions. But those media didn’t really work for me. What I really like now with the theatre is that you get an audience who dedicate a set time of their life exclusively to the one experience that you are proposing.

Participation and a direct contact with the audience was already an integral part of your earlier work. Now you seem to use this mechanism to address the collective and a political awareness.

Perhaps that is true. But it is not only about becoming aware of the collective moment as such. It’s rather about what happens with this collective moment. The traffic jam in the last version of Postcards from the Future (2011) with C&H was also already dealing with this. Groups of people coming together and following a common plan. You collectively step into this fictional extreme for an hour. The interruption is immense: you suspend the entire city to go for that one thing. In that sense, it is really about what collective moments produce and what types of energies and perspectives this opens. What do you see when you take the plunge together?

Something similar happens in Some use for your broken clay pots (2014). You collectively decide to discuss a proposal for a new constitution, as though it were a serious proposal and as though this theatre were a parliament. The moment everybody steps into it, it becomes real, which is probably what theatre is about to some extent. We take a collective decision to give credit to things that don’t get credited outside of the room, such as, in this case, a political utopia.

By inviting the audience to become a collective, they are given a responsibility from which they can’t just walk away. That’s very much the case with Verein zur Aufhebung des Notwendigens. It is all about the responsibility you get as soon as you come in. During this piece, the audience prepare a meal collectively, guided by a subversive anonymous cookbook. If you leave the hall, the others will suffer as a result, because a step will be missing in the recipe. Somehow, it is also about creating an artistic practice in which consumption is relativized. In Verein, there is literally a consumption because you eat food, but you must have worked for it. Of course, watching a play is always a kind of engagement, but with works like Verein, there is an exposure. The lights are on because you become accountable for what you do.

Another project I am developing with Ant Hampton, which we are provisionally calling 'the automatic workshop', touches on this same thing: it is all about putting people in a position to take a step. Once you have taken this step, there is a whole chain of consequences. For instance, when you raise your voice in the public space, you can’t take your voice back. You have raised it, so people will turn around. It’s a gesture that initiates engagement. I’m trying to get to these kinds of qualities into the theatre pieces as well.

As an artist, you put yourself in a very vulnerable position in relation to the audience. You don’t really know how the piece will end and you try to convince your audience to enter the same speculative situation. Could we call this speculative aspect a philosophical artistic gesture? And how do you consider your role as an artist in this light?

Probably. I am trying to create situations rather than pieces. I’m using theatre, dramaturgy and the whole existing practice to create situations which, rather than being fiction, belong to a different reality. That’s where things become interesting for me: if you’re discussing a real political issue in clay pots, why is it less real than when you do so outside? Sometimes, people are offended because they realize that I was not ‘serious’ in the piece. But then what is serious?

Vulnerability is unavoidable when you create participation because you ask people to engage without knowing. To gain this trust, you have to make your position, or that of the piece, as vulnerable as the audience's. If there are risks, you must take them together. You can’t ask people to take risks and just lean back and relax yourself. In Verein you go on stage and do something, and if you mess it up, nobody’s going to help you if not another spectator. At the same time, the piece itself can also go wrong at any moment. Someone could take the script and throw it into the water. Then it’s finished: the script is gone and there is no back-up. If you don’t take care of the piece, the piece stops.

In the project Fondo Speculativo di Provvidenza, which I do with Luigi Coppola, we put each audience member in the position of having to decide about what should be done with a sum of money that has been raised collectively. Here, one voice can change everything. That is what agency is about: the moment you can change something, you can also change it for the worse. What is offered is never only a plus. It’s like Borges' short story 'Lottery in Babylon' where nobody wants to take part in a lottery because you could only win. But the moment they introduce unlucky numbers in the draw, playing becomes addictive. There is something unreal about only winning, it contradicts human intuition.

How do you see your residency?

I see it as a gift: I worry less about what exactly I will make, because for five years I won’t have this stress of having to convince people at every step. I can be more relaxed about making plans. I don’t like planning too much in advance. In my ideal world, I would finish one project, show it, understand it and then think about the next one. It is the kind of dynamic which is present in Fondo Speculativo. It’s only after taking one step that we can think of the next one.

I will follow the same content track, I suppose. The next piece coming up is The Trial of Money. It’s about our relationship to money and to what extent money itself, as a system, could be made accountable for the terrible situation in which we find ourselves on this planet. It’s a trial: it gravitates towards having to make a decision about it. If you condemn money, you must of course have an alternative. The challenge of the piece is to create a tribunal that is credible. I don’t want to reach a verdict, but rather for people to go home and think about their own verdict.

You started visiting Brussels in 2000. What’s your relationship with the city? And would you like to engage with Brussels in your future work?

It’s a very complex relationship. Since I’m French speaking, coming to Brussels always felt a bit like coming home. On the other hand, I can’t imagine living in Brussels forever. There is hardly any nature in this place. Or at least not nature where you get overwhelmed and where you feel small again like in the mountains. I am Swiss, remember.

I hope the work I do does engage with the city even though it’s in the theatre space. I don’t crave either public space or the theatre, one just makes more sense for the ideas I have at the moment.

In my engagement with the city, there is an image that I have at the moment which I find kind of inspiring for thinking about ways in which reality inside of the artistic or theatre bubble could relate to reality outside it: groups of citizens building speakers and hanging them everywhere in the city. The speakers are connected with a big fat yellow cable, that enters the door of the theatre, so you cannot close it anymore. Inside the theatre space, other citizens hold political speeches. The fictional framework enables them to write and say things they wouldn't perhaps dare to say on the square outside. Yet, through the cable reaching out of the theatre and through the speakers, the speeches can be heard across the entire city.

Christophe Meierhans in conversation with Guy Gypens and Eva Decaesstecker