EPISODE is a collective formed by Prue Lang, Nicole Peisl, and Richard Siegal, dedicated to the development of extemporaneous performance. In an attempt to re-think the performance-making process, the collective created the Episode dogma through which to develop systems of real-time composition. Each Episode is created in accordance with the dogma and opens the space to collective participation and authorship.

In collaboration with performers – Ayman Harper, Charlie Hubner, David Kern, Vanessa Le Mat and Roberta Mosca -The How Episode was created after an invitation from Berlin’s CONTEXT festival whose theme in 2004 was « authorship ». Episode began the process by asking each performer to buy a fortune cookie on a specific day and noted the recollections of this event. The network of individual trajectories and experiences very quickly brought up issues of orientation, expectation, interpretation and translation, from which physical and linguistic parameters were developed for the performance system. Members of the audience were invited to set the dance in motion by responding to questions that subsequently fed into the real-time system. The translation from one language to another, from text into movement, and from movement into language, generated a stream of transforming compositions, facilitating the articulation of a collective performance system.

50 minutes
10m x 8m
8 x performers

Hebbel-am-ufer (HAU 3) Berlin GERMANY 2004

Co-production : Hebbel-am-Ufer Berlin and the EPISODE collective