Radio Ballet

Übung in nichtbestimmungsgemäßem Verweilen

Exercise in lingering not according to the rules

Radio-Performance at the Leipzig main station
22. June 2003, 18.30-20.00

A Radio Ballet is a radio play produced for the collective reception in certain public places. It gives the dispersed radio listeners the opportunity, to subvert the regulations of the space.

The Radio Ballet took place in the main station of Leipzig, Germany, a former public space that is under private control of the German railway compa¬ny (Deutsche Bahn - DB) since the mid-nineties. It is controlled by a panoptic regime of sur¬veillance cameras, security guards and an architecture, that avoids any dark and „dangerous“ corners. The system of control keeps out every kind of deviant behaviour. People, who sit down on the floor or start to beg are detected immediately and instantly expelled.

The Radio Ballet brought back these excluded gestures of deviant behavior into the main station. Around 500 participants - usual radio listeners, no dancers or actors – were invited to enter the station, equipped with cheap, portable radios and earphones. By means of these devices they could listen to a radio program consisting of a choreography suggesting permitted and forbidden gestures (to beg, to sit or lie down on the floor etc.). These suggestions were inter¬rupted by reflections on the public space and on the Radio¬ballett itself.

Like ghostly remnants the excluded gestures haunted for the 90 minutes of the performance the controlled public space and opened it for an uncanny and uncontrollable situation. The people listened to the radio and thus did not have to listen to the ‘commands��� the controlled space is enunciating once and again. The radio ballet was an already recorded. We did not know, how many people would participate, how they would react to the play and how the situation would be. Paradoxically by broadcasting a recorded choreography proposing very specific gestures the radio ballet opened in every regard an uncontrollable situation.

LIGNA is a group consisting of Ole Frahm, Michael Hueners and Torsten Michaelsen. In radio shows and performan¬ces LIGNA explores the possibilities of the underestimated medium radio and how radio waves can invade public space.