Open Spaces!

Theatre audiences don’t look like the people I have grown up with and that is why I feel it is not a place for me. (Fahadi Muluku)

Gob Squad, for almost 30 years, have made theater with the aim of making genuine connections, the theater with the street, the audience with passing strangers, framing reality and elevating the everyday. Gob Squad desire to make art that can reach everyone.

The neighborhood of their artistic home, the HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, are hardly part of their audience. Why is theater, for its local residents, not a place of desire? And what does it mean if, although diverse bodies and perspectives are shown on stage, this is not mirrored in the audience?

In the UK, the cultural sector has seen a shift in favor of broader social participation. So, Gob Squad have invited Rhiannon White and Simon Casson from the UK Groups Common Wealth and Duckie, to share their experiences and strategies with them and other cultural workers.

Through "HAU to connect" (HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlins mediation program) they are in exchange with activists from the neighborhood. Together, they wish to explore how they can activate change. Why is the "popularization of culture" for some problematic? Where is the demarcation between art (high culture) and so-called "social projects"? Who differentiates and why? What would have to happen so that new opportunities for inclusion can arise? With "Open Space!" they aim to find solutions.

Artistic direction: Gob Squad Arts Collective (Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Sharon Smith, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost, Simon Will), Nora Vollmond (Artistic Collaboration), with the support of: Stella Konstantinou (Dramaturg HAU to connect, Mediation Program of HAU Hebbel am Ufer), impulse givers* from UK: Rhiannon White (Common Wealth), Simon Casson (Duckie), Fahadi Muluku (Sounding Board/Common Wealth East-Cardiff), Jude Thoburn-Price (Sounding Board/Common Wealth East-Cardiff), visitors* at "Open Spaces!": Miles Chalcraft, Azadeh Ganjeh, Christina Runge, Salma Salaheldin, Felix Zilles-Perels, actors from the neighborhood of the HAU Hebbel am Ufer venue, staff from various departments of HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin and other cultural workers from various production houses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Grischa Schwiegk (eins∞ / third-party productions, Production Management), Miles Chalcraft (Image Documentation) & Rocío Rodríguez (Trailer Editing)