The Collective Eye

Im Gespräch mit Roberto Ciulli – Überlegungen zur kollektiven Praxis

„Wenn es überhaupt einen produktiven Ort kollektiver Intelligenz gibt, so ist es das Theater.“

No stage takes greater license with classics and contemporary plays alike than the Theater an der Ruhr in Mülheim, founded in 1980. The godfather of multicultural theater in the heart of the Ruhr, Roberto Ciulli (b. Milan, Italy, 1934; lives and works in Mülheim a. d. Ruhr) has long been a prominent figure on the German theater scene. In 2014, Ciulli was awarded the State Prize of the State of North Rhine–Westphalia in recognition of his decades-long untiring efforts to promote intercultural understanding and his defining influence over the country’s theater culture. His vision of a theater that breaks free of the Eurocentric and Christian-dominated role clichés is widely admired. As Ciulli sees it, the theater has the utopian potential to develop a collective intelligence that opens up perspectives of a novel communal order—toward a stage on which the social can unfold.

The Collective Eye spoke to the exceptional director about his anthropological take on theater work, a new and liberal conception of authorship, language, and the collective desire for understanding and utopias of a different society that theatrical practice makes manifest. Previous books in the series have featured Elmgreen & Dragset and Slavs and Tatars.

ABOUT THE COLLECTIVE EYE

The Collective Eye (TCE) is a project collective whose membership fluctuates. In interviews, symposia, exhibitions, and books for which TCE engages selected partners in dialogue, it seeks to strengthen a multinational dialogue between collectives and theorists grappling with collective creativity and practices in the arts. Its scope transcends boundaries of discipline, encompassing forms of collaboration in the visual and performing arts, in theaters, museums, and the interstices of cultural production.