Texts by Jörg Heisser, Magdalena Malm, Ann-Sofi Sidén
Graphic design: Malmsten Hellberg
2012, English, hardcover
144 pages, 25 x 19 cm
ISBN 9789197998505
Curtain Callers shows the processes that form the charged moment when audience and actor meet - how each, in a quasi-ritualistic way, prepare for the encounter with the other. Between the spaces of the actors and the audience there are stories: written, private, and perhaps only rumoured. The theatre is a never-ending chain of beginnings and endings that reflects humanity’s complexity and doubleness.
The artist Ann-Sofi Sidén and the composer Jonathan Bepler observed the work and processes behind the scenes at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm at various times. They invited six hundred choral singers to play the part of an ‘average’ audience. By staging and directing the audience, its participatory role in the machine that makes up the institution of the theatre is deepened and emphasized. In Curtain Callers the working processes of the theatre are replaced by images of spatial constructions and the remnants of gestures and routines that speak their own language.