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Plenary Speeches
Theater and City
Walter Weyers (Memmingen)
Theater people and public live in the same here and now and experience the theater performance in the identity of space and time.
But they do not experience time in the same way. They differ in their perception.
Before the empty space we put a structure and name it time. Presented in this way, time is always different.
Whoever perceives time in a particular way is pursuing it or ahead of it. - The theater is home to such creators of time.
They track down and animate the past, in order to make that which has become visible as the origin. In such limitation the mere factuality of the present is relativized.
Thus the future becomes the task. To implant perspectives and projects into the currently familiar, whose effectiveness and justification are settled but a long way from being accessible.
Not everyone is open-minded and receptive to this undertaking. The uncertainty disturbs the certainty. Theater is the willingness to trust oneself to something strange and foreign, which claims to be one's own and yet must first still become part of one.
The theater cannot hope for trust everywhere to the same degree. For the close-minded and mistrustful its strangeness or foreignness makes it a provocation. To endure rejection is part of its resolve. That is a condition of the possibility of art in general.
Discerning the specific contradictions in a city is a presupposition for communication between artists and recipients.Theater is adventure. And a speech: unlimited and limited.
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