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Peter Lorenz
Stage Director & Performance Maker
Theatre
Performance
Opera
Herr Mit Sonnenbrille
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Herr Mit Sonnenbrille (2018)
The Scenery seems somehow familiar. A village in the mountains. The landscape: dramatic and picturesque. The steel-industry used to be based here but since the factory has been closed, the entire village is set on tourism. Just that it does not work anymore as expected. The tourists only come only briefly, don’t stay or don’t come at all. Sometimes a worker jumps from a scenic rock and the village youth has no better occupation than sex anymore. Still everyone is proud of themselves. The village, the landscape, the community, not to forget the tradition: such things create identity which nobody can take away. ‘If you are inside you always want to get out but outside is usually overrated.’ Attempts to escape are pointless - where to? Still, He and She try to revolt against the We which is always the same and still they are actually fighting themselves. A fight which can only be lost: They stay and encounter themselves, an old, disillusioned couple, for whom the future appears just as a memory.
The staging focuses on the speechlessness between the characters and their inability to listen to each other. Caught in patriotic and male chauvinism, the characters can’t escape themselves in the eternal disappointment of their expectations and the resulting potential of violence between them. Words become only shells and replace discourse in an apparently idyllic world. Loving intimacy is seen as ‘heavy labour without prospect of something big’ and sexuality becomes passive consumption.
Written by Gerhild Steinbuch
Directed by Peter Lorenz
Set- & Lighting-Design by Nikolaus Granbacher
Performed by Barbara Hechenleitner, Monika Haslauer, Jodie Köhle, Angelika Beirer, Elena Beirer, Günter Jaritz & Regina Penz
Performed by the Ensemble of the Generationentheater at diemonopol in Innsbruck (AUT).
Bambiland
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Bambiland (2017)
One toy land is turned into another toy land amidst the no man’s land between battlefield and playground. In the game of televised war, it is hard to tell who is allowed to say ‘we’ any more. A solo performer struggles with words and language as she attempts to untangle the machinery of war and mediatisation. She remembers media accounts of the Iraq war when she was a teenager and memories of the Bosnian war when she was a child refugee herself. In piles of human detritus and plastic toys, it becomes difficult to see the distinction between appearances and reality. Everything you see is true but none it is real. The violence lies in the act of representation and, with the help of live video, the performer tries to reclaim agency in the global cycles of constant destruction and reconstruction. Words are disembodied and reembodied. The frontline in the war of words between ‘us’ and ‘them’ starts to blur as accounts of Iraqi deserts and the siege of Sarajevo bleed into each other. The violent act of representation is played back to us on video and we find ourselves in the middle of this game of televised war. It all comes back round, especially the wars.
written by Elfriede Jelinek
translated by Lilian Friedberg
directed by Peter Lorenz
performed by Jelena Bašić
dramaturgy by Irina Glinski
video by Michał Sztepiuk
with Stanley Smith
supervised by Graham Eatough
with technical support of Tony Sweeten
'I had the pleasure of being involved with the presentation of Bambiland as a supervising tutor at Glasgow University Theatre Studies department. Everyone here thought it to be a work of the highest quality in the rigour of its conceptualisation and the flare of its execution. I cannot recommend this excellent and vitally timely production more highly.'
- Dr. Graham Eatough (Director & Lecturer at the University of Glasgow)
Performed at the James Arnott Theatre & the Glad Café in Glasgow (UK) as part of the Worker's Theatre Weekender.
Elsewheres
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Elsewheres (2017)
Is this really something you want to see or would you rather be somewhere else? What else would you be doing? The Doing Group can do it for you. You have the choice and you will be disappointed. Indescribable excess is the cause of our desires. Still, we try to surprise you. We have created an impossible third space of encounter between simultaneous performances in Glasgow and Helsinki and we might have gotten a bit lost in it. As we find ourselves tied to the mast desiring different elsewheres, we drift off. Now, we have committed to it. We are obliged to enjoy.
Original Devised Performance by The Doing Group shown at the James Arnott Theatre in Glasgow (UK) and at Temporary in Helsinki (FI) supported by the Alistair Cameron Scholarship and TeaK.
Rain Is Liquid Sunshine
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Rain Is Liquid Sunshine (2016)
What futures can we imagine when ideas of progress have drained away?
Rain is Liquid Sunshine asks how weather systems, deconstruction and other urban cycles might inspire collective urban imagination. In the exploration, The Doing Group situated themselves in a demolition site, engaging with the material qualities of both weather and detritus material found there. Performative interventions sought to activate the ubiquitous relationships between bodies, material and site, troubling notions of continual urban progress.
In the context of the black box theatre, Rain Is Liquid Sunshine interrogates how bodies and materials might create cycles and networks. Throughout the hour-long performance, a landscape emerges as materials reveal their singularities. Crashing rubble transforms into a soft dust, gently raining onto a thrumming metal grid. Handheld spray bottles dampen a climate in which a car tyre floats and tumbles in the gusts of a fan in the corner.
Each of the objects on stage weave their way into the cycle of another, and the bodies of human performers become background to the vibrancy of what might often be passed off as left over. Through evocative images created by performing the materials potentialities, the performance negotiates how we might imagine our environment anew.
'The performance by The Doing Group, Rain is Liquid Sunshine, was full of apt visual metaphors about sustainable building, with well-chosen text to match. The GU students’ name is a riposte to the passivity of a reading group, of course, so when you’ve done with my words, take the hint and give them your active support.'
- Keith Bruce (Arts Editor for Herald Scotland)
'The Doing Group make strange, post-apocalyptic performance. Mad Max for kids. In Rain is Liquid Sunshine, a tyre is sent spinning into the sky, rain is produced through the interplay of an electric fan and a plastic water-spray bottle, and a fragmented text speaks of ruins. This is ecological performance, not because of what it says or discourses about, but because of what it does, its evocative mode of signifying produced by bodies, words and objects. There is nothing miserablist about this work of recycled remainders and detritus. What we experience as spectators, rather, is a strange sense of wonder, perhaps even a kind of astonishment – a happiness of sorts that might allow us to begin again and again. In their exhaustible affirmation of ruins, the Doing Group are true to their own mission statement: the aim – the ambition – is to use performance as a vehicle for thinking and feeling; which, in this instance, investigates what it means to live now, in a fragile and precarious time of political and ecological crisis. Rain is Liquid Sunshine is the best thing I have seen in Glasgow this year – an original and timely performance that does something new.'
- Prof. Carl Lavery (Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Glasgow)
Original Devised Performance by The Doing Group shown at the Pollockshields Playhouse as part of the Southside Fringe and as part of the UNFIX: ReBirth! Festival at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow (UK).
Reflections On The Self
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Reflections On The Self (2016)
We live in a world in which we constantly need to define and construct identities of responsible individuals around ourselves. This challenging new piece of contemporary performance explores notions of self and attempts to bring the constructed narrative of the self into crisis. The performers struggle with movement, text and video on stage questioning self-perception and self-presentation from the outside and inside. The performance unfolds like a broken mirror, as a fragmented collage of images and collective writings, which disrupts the idea of a unified, strong individual self dominant in Western individualism.
Director: Peter Lorenz
Performers: Hannah Kendaru, Hannah Wright, James Primmer, Joel McDiarmid
Technician: Michał Sztepiuk
Supervised by Nic Green
Original Devised Performance shared at the James Arnott Theatre in Glasgow (UK) and the Tron Theatre as part of Outside Eyes.
Photo Credits: Mihaela Bodlovic.
Hamletmachine
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Hamletmachine (2014)
HAMLETMACHINE is a collective experience. The pleasure in chaos. The joy in excess. The unleashing of insanity and the irrational. Finding a new weapon of not-knowing to lead the diseased knowledge to self-criticism. Exposing the cancer that devours the culture from within.
Heiner Müller allegorically breaks down and burns out the dramatic machinery of the cultural artefact of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He calls his text the ’shrunken head of the Hamlet tragedy’ set at the ruins of our society where no substance for dialogue exists anymore because there is no more history.
Defined by Arlene Akiko Teraoka as the ’the articulation of the postmodern revolution’, HAMLETMACHINE labels itself as a product of our society openly reflecting the cultural influences which shaped it. In the words of the author it ’may be read as a pamphlet against the illusion that one can stay innocent in this our world.’ Quotes from Shakespeare’s play as well as T.S. Eliot, Andy Warhol, Coca Cola, Ezra Pound and Susan Atkins among others interwoven into the choral stream of consciousness convey a nostalgic yearning for a sense of meaning, a sense of genuine feeling now lost within a dead literary model. The text becomes but one element in the production, along with the physicality of the actors as well as audio and visual dimensions of live music and projections.
written by Heiner Müller
Hamlet / Hamlet-Actor: Dan Kelsey
Ophelia / Getrude: Frances Pattinson
Horatio / Polonius / Ghost / Claudius / Chorus - Josh Widera
Director - Peter Lorenz
Designer - Saskia-Lara Neupert
Stage-Manager - Louise Pålhed
Video Projections - Verena Kramer
Music and Sound Arrangement - Adam Carmichael
Lighting Technician - Manda Tamosauskaite
Sound Technician - Aiste Veseckaite
Many thanks to Kraftwerk, Ian Dickson, Rika Zayasu and Claudio Records.
Morag You’re A Long Time Deid
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Morag You’re A Long Time Deid (2018)
This loop-based performance explores how Scottish ballads can be reclaimed from a queer feminist perspective. The piece follows the journey of Kate, a Scottish Canadian woman, through a universe of looped sounds where she hopes to unearth the silenced story of her enigmatic ancestor Morag. Intrigued by unanswered questions about Morag’s possible queerness and disturbed by the mystery of her suicide, Kate returns to Scotland to learn about her family’s ballad singing tradition. As she engages more deeply with the ballads, she comes face to face with colonial and patriarchal dynamics embedded within the musical tradition as well as her own family’s history. Armed with her loop-pedal and a desire for healing, Kate begins to re-compose and re-write her family’s songs, unearthing note-by-note what parts of her traditions to carry forward and what must be left behind.
Written by Claire Love Wilson
Directed by Peter Lorenz
Performed by Claire Love Wilson, Alasdair Roberts & Rory Comerford
Work-In-Progress Showing at the Gaiety Theatre in Ayr (GB) as part of the Theatre Lab Residency at the University of the West of Scotland.
Time Dust
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Time Dust (2016)
Dust does not help us to remember, it reminds us that we have already forgotten. The choreographic solo performance TIME DUST investigates the temporality of ruins and decay on the basis of dust. The dance of dust and mirror-fragments takes us into the fragile world of remnants and disturbs the dust which has settled on the memory of war and trauma. In search of a future, present and past are burst in the haunting sound space. The disturbing excess of dust cannot be grasped and destruction and decay will eventually gain the upper hand.
TIME DUST’s simple movement language captures a sense of ruination and memory beyond words and speaks to audiences in affective images. The interplay between mirror-suit, dust and light creates ephemeral sculptures in the air. The choreography and soundscape intertwine and merge into a visual sound-choreography: the performer creates sounds with movements on and across the stage element which are picked up by integrated mics and transformed into complex soundscapes to which the movements react in turn again.
Directing & Performance: Peter Lorenz
Dramaturgy: Irina Glinski
Sound-Design: Martin Hofstetter
Lighting-Design: Nikolaus Granbacher
Video: Matthias Helldoppler
May/June 2016 - First research development residency and work-in-progress performance at the Street Arts Festival in Mostar & in collaboration with Kollektiv Kreativna & CRVENA in Sarajevo, funded by ASI Reisen & the Austrian Chancellory.
September 2018 - Full development with a dramaturge, light-designer & sound-designer for the Austrian Premiere at the theatre diemonopol in Innsbruck, funded by the City Council Innsbruck & Tyrolian Culture Fund
A Home for Nessie
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A Home for Nessie (2017)
Nessie might be forced to move. Due to the uncertainties caused by Brexit, The Doing Group has filed an application for permanent residence in the name of the Loch Ness Monster. The UK Home Office has rejected this application, forcing Nessie to consider moving to a new lake within the EU. The general public is now invited to submit their favourite new lakes as a possible new home for the legendary creature.
www.ahomefornessie.com
Artistic Response to Brexit through Video, Online and Print Media in Glasgow (UK) commissioned by the Goethe Institute Glasgow and presented at the "Spaces of Exile - Performing Borders in Europe" Symposium at Tramway in Glasgow (UK).
There Is Lots Of Activity Going On Here But No Control.
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There Is Lots Of Activity Going On Here But No Control. (2016)
We try to facilitate an experience of a more-than-human landscape. We do not reproduce or reflect, we map interferences of a variety of materials and experiments. We are not interested in where differences appear but rather where the effects of difference appear. We explore activity, agency and control in landscapes beyond our bodies. We are bodies in these landscapes. We become part of their continuous assemblage of interactivities. We are more-than-human. We question subjectivities - allow ourselves to be subject to matter. Our bodies (are) matter. The journey has lead us to experiments, still dances and site-specific field work only to lead us back into the studio. The piece unfolds like a diffraction pattern. Sounds and images are repeated and amplified. Loud and harsh soundscapes of digestive processes are interspersed between choreographic sequences between bodies and matter. We think like eaters. We listen and tear things apart. We amplify and magnify to discover light coming in through the cracks. We tune into cycles and rhythms to find silences. We try to expand the “we” into a more-than-human collaboration. Together we are all actants. We map out our interactions through the traces of activity. There is a lot of activity going on here but no control.
'>There is a lot of activity going on here but no control.< is a thoughtful, poetic and playful piece that prompts us to re-imagine our relationship with “things”. By creating a space in which everything seems to be slowed down – nearly meditative – and incredibly close-up, the group is able to subtly and cleverly confront the audience with larger questions of how we might encounter non-human matters, the impact of our actions on the environment and finding new, more expansive, ways of living within a more-than-human world.'
- Dr. Cara Berger (Lecturer in Drama at the University of Manchester)
'>There was a lot of activity going on here but no control.< is an immersive performance, with a distributed sense of itself. Here, the stage is transformed into a landscape, in which actors and objects share agency and bleed into each other. Had he seen it, Bruno Latour might have called this a theatrical assemblage. In this performance, theatre is an actant in and by itself, and the imagination is a by-product of materiality. This is performance for the anthropocene. It is brilliantly relevant.'
- Prof. Carl Lavery (Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of Glasgow)
Original devised performance at the Gilmorehill Studio Theatre by Arianne Welsh, Cait Lennox, Claire Dorrance, Rachel Pyke, Fiona Hollow, Jodie Creechan, Annie Saxberg and Peter Lorenz.
Muziklaža
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Muziklaža (2015)
As part of the Austrian Artist Delegation funded by the Austrian Embassy in Sarajevo, we designed a three-day multi-arts workshop for the Street Arts Festival in Mostar. We used walking practices like drifting and soundwalking to explore the sonic character of the city of Mostar. The objects and materials found on our walks were upcycled into instruments and assembled into an interactive sound-installation in the abandoned ruin of the Old Library. Now, this transformed public sound-library invites passerbies to leave their ordinary walking routes and engage creatively with their living environment. The reappropriation and instrumentalisation of the trash in the installation represents a collective auditory reimagining of what is left behind in the city. The collaborative process aimed to open up the participants’ perception of the city through sonic exploration leading to a recovery of agency in shaping the city through its soundscape.
Interactive Sound Installation by Laurin & Peter Lorenz at the Street Arts Festival in Mostar (BiH) awarded a Walking Visionaries Award at Walk21 in Vienna (AUT) supported by the Austrian Embassy in Sarajevo (BiH).
Imprints: Hush Hush
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Imprints: Hush Hush (2015)
Living sculpture. Inside out. Secretchamberzipupboilercupboardrecyclingcave. A maze of sculpture, performance art, and sound installation invites you to playfully explore traces of the artists’ existence. New perspectives on living spaces and relationships between social/private and outer/inner life are opened up. Together we re-imagine intimate worlds. A vibrant diversity of microcosms subverts notions of success and failure. The place of exhibition provides the living context of the work.
This performative exhibition of interactive installations was presented by Trent Kim, Adam Carmichael and Peter Lorenz as part of the Glasgow Open House Festival 2015.
Photo Credits: Lubomir Ballek.
Stillhang
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Stillhang (2018)
As the partner of Karl Valentin, Liesl Karlstadt was the most famous comedy actress in pre-war Germany. She spent the “best time of her life” as Obergefreiter (lance corporal) Gustl in a Tyrolean mountain trooper unit from 1941 to 1943 on the Ehrwalder high Alpine pasture, first as “stable boy” with her beloved mule pack animals directly beneath the Zugspitze mountain. A fifty-year-old woman, characterised nevertheless by the worst period in Europe, at the lowest point of her life among lots of young recruits. A suicide victim between heaven and earth. Sometimes she played the father, sometimes the nursing mother for the nineteen-year-olds, but above all they played peace in the midst of war. A young Tyrolean composer has now created a tragi-comic picture parade full of poetry and tender eloquence based on this true occurrence. A bizarre dance on the volcano.
Composer & Conductor: Christian Spitzenstaetter
Librettist & Director: Klaus Ortner
Set- & Costume-Design / Assistant Director: Peter Lorenz
Performers: Isabel Karajan, Frederik Baldus, Sascha Zarrabi, David Zürcher, Johannes Puchleitner, Thomas Lichtenecker, Joseph Ruppert, Ilja Martin Schwärsky & Olivier Kessi
Commissioned by and performed at the Tiroler Festspiele Erl (AUT).
La Bohème
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La Bohème (2017-2019)
Opera in Italian by Giacomo Puccini.
As Assistant Director with Scottish Opera (UK) at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow, His Majesty’s Theatre in Aberdeen, the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh and the Eden Court Theatre in Inverness & as Rivival Director at Theater St. Gallen (CH) & Vancouver Opera (CA).
Director: Renaud Doucet
Designer: André Barbe
Conductors: Stuart Stratford, Hermes Helfricht & Judith Yan
Casts: Hye-Youn Lee, Luis Gomes, David Stout, Jeanine De Bique, Božidar Smiljanić, Damien Pass & Jonathan Best as well as Sophia Brommer / Polina Pastirchak / Serena Farnocchia, Leonardo Capalbo / Kyungho Kim / Teodor Ilincai, Shea Owens, David Maze, Tomislav Lucic / Martin Summer & Paulo Madeiros, furthermore France Bellemare, Ji-Min Park, Phillip Addis, Goeffrey Schellenberg, Neil Craighead, Sharleen Joint & J. Patrick Raftery
Il Ritorno d’Ulisse In Patria
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Il Ritorno d’Ulisse In Patria (2017)
Opera in Italian by Claudio Monteverdi.
As Assistant Director for the Festival of Early Music at the Tiroler Landestheater Innsbruck (AUT).
Director: Ole Anders Tandberg
Set Designer: Erlend Birkeland
Costume Designer: Maria Geber
Conductor: Alessandro De Marchi
Cast: Kresimir Spicer, Christine Rice, David Hansen, Nina Bernsteiner, Hagen MAtzeit, Marcell Bakonyi, Francesco Castoro, Ann-Beth Solvang, Carlo Allemano, Jeffrey Francis, Ingebjørg Kosmo, Vigdis Unsgård, Petter Moen, Halvor F. Melien and Andrew Harris.
Il Matrimonio Segreto
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Il Matrimonio Segreto (2016-2018)
Opera in Italian by Domenico Cimarosa.
As Assistant Director for the Festival of Early Music at the Tiroler Landestheater Innsbruck (AUT) & as Rivival Director at Oper Köln (GER).
Director: Renaud Doucet
Designer: André Barbe
Conductor: Alessandro De Marchi & Gianluca Capuano
Cast: Giulia Semenzato, Klara Ek, Renato Girolami, Donato di Stefano, Loriana Castellano, Jesus Alvarez as well as Emily Hindrichs, Anna Palimina, Jennifer Larmore & Norman Reinhardt
Armide
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Armide (2015-2017)
Opera in French by Jean-Baptiste Lully.
As Assistant Director for the Festival of Early Music at the Tiroler Landestheater Innsbruck (AUT), Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci (GER) and Warsaw Chamber Opera (PL).
Director: Deda Christina Colonna
Designer: Francesco Vitali
Conductor: Patrick Cohën-Akenine & Benjamin Bayl
Cast: Emilie Renard, Rupert Charlesworth, Daniela Skorka, Miriam Albano, Pietro di Bianco, Tomislav Lavoie, Bass, Jeffrey Francis, Enquerrand de Hys and the Nordic Baroque Dancers.
La Púrpura De La Rosa
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La Púrpura De La Rosa (2015)
Opera in Spanish by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco.
As Assistant Director for the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci (GER).
Director, Puppet & Costume Designer: Hinrich Horstkotte
Set Designer: Nicolas Bovey
Conductor: Eduardo Egüez
Cast: Francesca Lombardi Mazzulli, Roberta Mameli, Mariana Rewerski, Anna Alàs i Jové, Maximiliano Baños, Magdalena Padilla, Olga Pitarch, Furio Zanasi and the Nova Lux Ensemble.
Photo Credits: Stefan Gloede.
Peter Lorenz started off as a trained clown and ended up directing Beckett, Müller and Jelinek as well as original performances ranging from solo choreographies to interactive installations in the UK, the Balkans and the German-speaking-area. Apart from studying at the United World College in Mostar (BiH) and the University of Glasgow (UK), Peter has been working regularly as assistant director for opera companies such as the Festival of Early Music in Innsbruck (AUT), the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci (GER), Scottish Opera (UK) and as revival director at the Theater St.Gallen (CH) with directors such as Renaud Doucet, Ole Anders Tandberg, Hinrich Horstkotte and Deda Christina Colonna.
Since 2011, Peter has been developing and sharing his own stagings and original performances in Mostar (BiH) at OKC Abrašević, the Croatian National Theatre and the Street Arts Festival of which Peter was a co-founder. In Glasgow (UK), Peter presented work at the James Arnott Theatre, Tron Theatre, Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Pollockshields Playhouse and Tramway. Peter enjoys getting inspired by playing with remnants of society such as ruins, detritus and noise. As part of Glasgow-based performance collective The Doing Group, Peter is constantly experimenting with new modes and formats of contemporary performance that investigate urban cycles, post-humanism and global interconnection.
