Johannes Birringer

Johannes Birringer (born November 30, 1953 in Schmelz , Saarland ) is a freelance director , choreographer and video artist . He lives and works in London , Houston and Saarland.

Life

Education and college

Birringer studied English , theater studies and history at the University of Trier (1978 state examination, 1979 MA). He has received foreign scholarships to study theater at the University of Cambridge and Yale University . His doctorate took place in 1983 on Christopher Marlowe: Marlowe's “Dr. Faustus "and" Tamburlaine ". Theological and theatrical perspectives . This was followed by visiting lectureships at Yale University, University of Texas at Dallas , Rice University Houston, at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen and at Northwestern University . He was also a Fellow at the Institute for Anthropology at Rice University and at the Institute for Art and Media at University College Chichester (England); from 1999 to 2003 Birringer was a lecturer at the Ohio State University for Dance Research (head of the dance technology course). In 2003 he was a Principal Research Fellow at the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University . Since 2006 Birringer has held the chair for Drama & Performance Technologies at Brunel University in London .

Theater works, exhibitions and research laboratories

Birringer became internationally known for his experimental opera Orpheus and Eurydice , composed in 1992 and premiered in Chicago . Together with Imma Sarries-Zgonc he choreographed the dance-film piece AlienNation (1993), which led to the establishment of the AlienNation Compagnie .

The lyrical feature film La lógica que se cumple , shot in Cuba, premiered at the Havana International Film Festival in December 1996 and screened at the Chicago Latino Film Festival in April 1997. Together with Imma Sarries-Zgonc, Birringer showed Before night falls as an installation performance in the project Metamorphoses ( Großsedlitz - Dresden ) and exhibited Romero Fishgarden with Maria de los Angeles at the Vogelfrei Biennale 1999 in Darmstadt . Together with the project team environments he exhibited interactive dance installations in Columbus ; the ghost island project was presented at the 2001 Intermediale in Mainz .

The ensemble of AlienNation Co. (Houston) made its first guest appearance in 1994 during the Grenzland Festival on the Oder in Germany; further guest appearances followed in Dresden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Finland, Canada, USA and Cuba. After reunification , Birringer increased his project collaboration with artists in Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe. In 1994 he won the IG Medien art prize for the project Locked Rooms in Eisenhüttenstadt . In 1995 he worked with Dresden artists and the Center for Contemporary Music (DZzM) and had the world premiere of the Parsifal room installation in the Hellerau Festival Hall . Further art and media projects in public space followed, including a. Parachute , an urban dance and music project commissioned by the Houston International Photo Festival in 1998.

Birringer has been leading international workshops for performance technologies since 1995 . The first net art works have been on the Internet since 1998 . In 1999, the multimedia opera Mirak was created , which premiered in Houston. The Vespucci film installation about the hallucinations of a cosmonaut trapped in the MIR has been shown in the USA, England and Brazil. He installed the interactive telepresence East by West , programmed in Dresden with Orm Finnendahl and Sher Doruff in 2002, at the DEAF03 festival of V2 in Rotterdam in 2003 .

From 1998 to 2000 Birringer curated the exhibition and performance program at the Winter Street Art Center in Houston. He set up a digital laboratory there that offers media workshops for young people and children.

At Ohio State University, Birringer founded the research laboratory environments in 1999 with three parallel research directions: 1. interactive technologies and digital interface design , 2. telematic performance, communication art and interaction on the Internet, and 3. motion capture , animation and virtual image space design.

In summer 2003, he founded the International Interaction Laboratory, a research laboratory for digital media and interactive architecture, on the site of the former Göttelborn mine . The laboratory took place periodically in the summer until 2014 with media artists, programmers and engineers from all over the world. In 2014 the laboratory published its third publication, the Manifesto of Interactive Art .

In Nottingham , he carried out research on interactive design for streaming media in the new Telematics Lab and, together with fashion designer Michèle Danjoux, founded the Design and Performance Lab , a laboratory for developing prototypes of intelligent clothing and sensory textiles, linked to the ongoing work of the ADaPT- Telepresence group, which he co-founded in 2000. The DAP Lab is now located in the Contemporary and Digital Performance Research Center at Brunel University in London. At the end of November 2005, he organized the Digital Cultures Lab for dance technologies in Nottingham , an international top meeting of choreographers and digital artists . He then produced several interactive dance installations, Suna no Onna, premiered at the Laban Center London (2008), followed by the research project UKIYO (Moveable Worlds), in which DAP-Lab and Keiō University / iNETdance (Japan) worked together. UKIYO was performed at Sadler's Well Theater in London in 2012, and has been shown elsewhere. A new series of immersive dance installations, Metakimospheres , will be created in 2015–17 as part of a Europe-wide project, METABODY. The DAP-Lab becomes one of the leading experimental dance laboratories for wearable media (so-called wearables ).

Birringer is co-editor of the PAJ Performing Arts Journal and has contributed to numerous art magazines. He is co-editor of the publications of the Interaktionslabor: Wechselffekt (2004), Spielsysteme (2006), Manifest der Interaktionskunst (2014) and editor of the Reflexiones sobre Performance, Cultura y Tecnología / Reflexions on Performance, Culture & Technology .

Works

Theater productions and films

• 1986 Hamletmachine , dance theater production, premiered at UTD Theater Dallas
• 1987 Description of a Landscape , performance / exhibition. Premiered at the UTD Theater, Dallas; exhibited at Lawndale Art Center, Houston 1988
• 1988 Translations , directed at the Satellite Theater, Houston
• 1989 Invisible Cities , dance theater performance, premiered at Lawndale Art Center, Houston
• 1990 Borderland , documentary film. Premiere at the Rice Media Center, Houston. Often shown: u. a. Greenway 3 Plaza Theater, Houston; Studio 71 New York; Hallwalls Gallery Buffalo; Houston International Film Festival; Universidad Nacional Madrid; Chicago Filmmakers; Saarländisches Künstlerhaus Saarbrücken , Grenzland Festival Eisenhüttenstadt
• 1990 Ad Mortem , film-dance-music concert, premiered at Lawndale Art Center and Diverse Works, Houston
• 1992 Orpheus and Eurydice , opera. First performance at the Josephine Louis Theater, Evanston-Chicago
• 1993 AlienNation , dance theater. Premiere at the Josephine Louis Theater (Evanston-Chicago) and then performed in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, at the Cleveland Performance Art Festival and at the Gran Teatro de La Habana , Cuba
• 1993 From the Border , multicultural performance festival, Northwestern University (Illinois)
• 1994 laureate of the IG-Medien art competition Schlaraffenland - Sabotage of virtual worlds
• 1995 Lovers Fragment's , dance theater and film performance, premiere at the Barber Theater, Evanston-Chicago, later performed in Cleveland and Dresden
• 1995 Parsifal , joint, site-specific opera installation, premiere at the Festspielhaus Hellerau, Dresden
• 1995 La lógica que se cumple , film project. International premiere at the Havana Film Festival in 1996; also shown at the Chicago Latino Film Festival 1997, at the Latin American Theater Conference at Univ. of California-Irvine et al. a.
• 1995 Closed Spaces , post-dramatic theater project, performed in Eisenhüttenstadt
• 1998 Parachute , performance and installation, International FotoFest Houston
• 1998 North by South, dance theater . Premiere at Diverse Works, Houston
• 1999 Vespucci , film installation, premiere at the Winter Street Art Center; exhibited at: ACA Gallery, Austin, Texas; Performance Studies International Conference, Tempe, Arizona; Performance Platform, Dartington College, England; University of Brasília Art Gallery, Brasília; Media Center, Graduate School of Semiotics and Communication-PUC-University, São Paulo
• 1999 Mirak , science fiction dance opera, premiere: DiverseWorks, Houston
• 2002 Embers , Telepresence Dance, premiered at the American College Dance Festival, Ann Arbor, Michigan
• 2002 Here I come again (Flying Birdman) , a telepresence performance linking five sites in the USA and two in Brazil, jointly produced by ADaPT and staged by the Environments Lab
• 2003 Sueño , multimedia drama (author: Angeles Romero), staged at Mount Hall, Columbus.
• 2004 Ensaio sobre a cegueir a, interactive opera installation , premiere: Interaktionslabor Göttelborn
• 2004 Xu , dance film, Beijing, China
• 2005 Canções dos olhos / Augenlieder , intermedial song cycle, premiere: Interaktionslabor Göttelborn
• 2006 See you in Walhalla , live game performance, jointly created by Interaktionslabor and amorphy.org, premiere at the IME Industrial Performing Arts Complex, Athens, Greece
• 2007 Suna no Onna , interactive dance performance, together with DAP-Lab, premiered at the Laban Center, London, repeated at the Watermans Art Center in 2008.
• 2008 Corpo, Carne e Espírito , digital oratorio (with music composed by Paulo Chagas), premiere at the FIT-BH Festival, Klauss Vianna Theater, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
• 2009-10 Ukiyo (Moveable World) , choreographic installation, created with DAP Lab and InetDance Japan / Maison d'Artaud, Tokyo. World premiere at the Artaud Performance Center, Brunel University, West London; Variants in Maribor and London (Sadler's Wells)
• 2012 for the time being (Victory over the Sun) , choreosonic dance work, Watermans, London, International Festival of Digital Art
• 2014 for the time being (Victory over the Sun) , dance opera, Lilian Baylis Studio-Sadler's Wells, London
• 2015 metakimosphere no.2, immersive dance installation, Mediaklab Prado, Madrid, Spain
• 2016 Sisyphus of the Ear, live film concert, with music by Paulo C. Chagas, Ufa, Moscow, Russia; Hong Kong

Books (selection)

• 1991 Theater, Theory, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP).
• 1998 Media and Performance: along the border (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP).
• 2000 Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture (London: Continuum).
• 2008 Performance, Technology, and Science (New York: PAJ Publications).

Birringer is co-editor of the anthology Tanz im Kopf / Dance and Cognition (2005), published by the German Dance Association (GTF), and Die Welt als virtuales Environment (2007, TMA Hellerau). With Josephine Fenger he published the GTF band Tanz und WahnSinn / Choreomania in 2011 .

Web links

• Alien Nation Co. - Johannes Birringer (English)
• Johannes Birringer - Chair in Drama & Performance Technologies Professor (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Johannes H. Birringer: Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus "and" Tamburlaine ". Theological and theatrical perspectives. In: Trier studies on literature . tape 10 . Lang, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1984, ISBN 3-8204-5421-7 .
2. ^ Johannes Birringer, Klaus Behringer (ed.): Spielsysteme Internationales Interaktionslabor Göttelborn. A documentation. PoCul-Verlag for Politics & Culture, Saarbrücken 2006, ISBN 978-3-929435-18-4 , p. 80 .
3. ↑ Johannes Birringer, Klaus Behringer (Hrsg.): Manifesto der Interaktionskunst Internationales Interaktionslabor Göttelborn 2013 A balance sheet after 10 years . PoCul-Verlag for Politics & Culture, Saarbrücken 2014, ISBN 978-3-929435-25-2 , p. 104 .