The Children's Choice Awards

24 August 2012

12 Rooms, Museum Folkwang, Jury 4

Die Ankunft am Folkwang Museum

WDR Essen begleitet uns durch die 12 bzw. 10 Räume

Ferhard über den Tauschraum

Evaluieren, Gespräch mit den Künstlern und Spaß im Garten des Museums

Hamsa hat im Tauschraum eine Tüte für den "Hund" ersteigert

Jérôme Bel's Disabled Theater

Jérôme Bel's Disabled Theater was another fantastic show for the jury. So far, the festival has been been a perfect festival for this project with all the work providing challenges but lots of thrills and mind-blowing moments. Bel's piece was right up there and left our entire group stunned and speechless.

The premise is simple. A group of developmentally disabled actors introduce themselves and do a little dance for us. That's about it. But the ethical minefield that Bel drags us into along with himself is intense. The actors are all rivetingly charming and the young jury didn't appear to be bored, though nothing really happened. It was simply a display of disability, some fairly severe in some cases.

This is not the forum for my opinions, so I'll stay quiet, but one of the chaperone's, who is the mom of one jury member (who comes on different nights) is a professional caregiver who spends every minute of her working day with developmentally disabled adults from ages 21 - 70, felt that it was absurd to applaud these very ordinary people for simply being themselves.

Members of the jury appreciated the piece but, in our personal Q&A afterward, fatigue and the common discomfort with disabled people rendered them quite silent, leaving me to wonder if applauding the choregraphically unremarkable efforts of actors - any actors - forms a coherent strategy to promote understanding. I think I'm with the chaperone on this one. But the show was completely entertaining for every single second, even if, as some of the actors themselves pointed out, it has been accused (by some of the actors' families, no less) of being a freak show. In my opinion, it's better to have a freak show than no show at all and that would tend to be the norm.

12 Rooms and Understanding Art

Santiago Sierra: Veterans of the wars of Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and Iraq facing the corner, 2011

We've had a lot of attention from the media here. TV crews, radio reporters, and print journalists have all hovered around the jury, some spending hours with us before, during and after the show. After they've spent time talking to the young people, they'll often have a chat with me and one of the common things they tell me is that the children do not understand the art. They tell me this with a bit of triumph, like they've discovered some flaw in the project. Yesterday I got fed up with this and turned the tables on the television journalist and, on camera, asked her if she had understood Tino Seghal
's contribution to 12 Rooms. Luckily she had an out: she hadn't been listening to the performer, so she couldn't comment. Then I said what I always say when reporters confront me with this information, which is the obvious (to me) point that, for the most part and particularly with much of the work we're seeing, understanding doesn't occur in the positivist sense. It's not like there's a plot where you either understand that Jimmy cheated on Chloe to get the bag of cocaine or you don't. Which isn't to say that there is nothing to understand, just that, for the most part, understanding is not going to be linguistic. It might be emotional, or intellectual, it might be feelings or it might be concepts but to distill it down into a bunch of words we can all agree on is just not going to happen. The young people understand what they understand. It seems silly to say that yet again, but there you go.

The 12 Rooms project is a perfect project for young people. You can walk around, you can leave a performance when you've had enough, you can often interact with the performers, you can score stuff and (though they were not allowed in) there is nudity. The nudity was particularly fun because, though the kids were banned, that didn't stop them from convincing one of the drivers and coordinators, Meike, to go in, so they could watch her reaction from the door. That's some serious post modern appreciation of the work happening there.