Maintaining Stranger

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Concept: Simone Aughterlony
Performance: Simone Aughterlony, Niall Noel Jones, Nic Lloyd, Mathias Ringgenberg, Hahn Rowe, Teresa Vittucci
Sculptures Design: Christopher Füllemann
Text: Jen Rosenblit and performers
Music: Hahn Rowe
Dramaturgical Advice: Jorge León, Saša Božic, Jen Rosenblit
Light Design: Florian Bach
Sculptures design assistant: Christophe Bozet
Vocal arrangement: Luke Deane
Costume Design: Eloïse Santschi
Technical Director: Marie Prédour
Stage Manager: Jan Olieslagers
Production Management: Sina Kießling
Administration: Karin Erdmann
Diffusion: arthappens.be

Production: Verein für allgemeines Wohl / Simone Aughterlony

Co-production: Gessnerallee Zürich, Arsenic – Contemporary Performing Arts Center, Lausanne, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin

Special Thanks: Dampfzentrale Bern

Supported by: City of Zurich, Canton of Zurich Fachstelle Kultur und Pro Helvetia - Swiss Cultural Foundation, Fondation Nestlé pour l´Art, Kulturfonds der Société Suisse des Auteurs

 

 

 

«Maintaining Stranger» proposes an artificially cultivated, rocky desert as a designated cruising zone for strange encounters. Capitalizing on the desert as a space to face one’s insignificance allows for the perfect abandon, to measure up against the immeasurable.

A collection of secondary characters, as if selected from different casts yet all iconic in their own way, scaffold intimacies that hold no claim on future proximity. Without home, script or history the strangers here actively engage beyond colonizing, they maintain a process of de-possessing while mining the other. Unravelling the notion of the stranger from a foreign concept to a proximal nature this ‘community of strangers’ are still gathered with the pains and joys of togetherness but maybe not tethered.

Feeling estranged becomes a position from which to question existing structures that hold things in place. Structures such as the family, the Nation State and even the couple portend to hold difference under an umbrella of exclusive ideals that must be assimilated. We are perpetually estranged and yet there is a sublimated drive that demands us to belong, to maintain familiarity and remain inside normative structures. Feelings of estrangement begin personally but have the potential to reverberate and reconfigure the political ecologies of relations.

«Maintaining Stranger» tracks the weather and the weathered, drifts and gaps between people where intimacy is most intensely felt. Love is nothing personal, difference always is.