Artist Statement

WAUHAUS was founded in 2016 and it is the collective of seven people. We do not have a single artistic leader, but instead our artistic ownership is shared. We constantly strive to find collectivity in making art, while allowing each member to work through their particular skill set and unique point of view. Our working groups consist of varying combinations of WAUHAUS’ members, with other artists and collaborators invited to join in to specific projects. 

Our decision to commit to each other to develop our artistic thinking and stage language together can be seen as a political gesture. Staying together is not a simple matter. It has taken us onto the slowly evolving path of creating and re-evaluating the structures of how we work together. We hope that this willingness to transform and keep on negotiating, year after year, can create a resilience much needed in these times – and hopefully, in many years yet to come. 

As artists and individuals we are not ready, but in a perpetual state of change. Our works are not uniform and they cannot be located within a single genre. They float between theatre, dance, live art and visual art, while reaching out towards other art forms and traditions. Our aim is to create porous structures that bend and mould according to our varying needs and different works. This often requires for time to pass, so that the differing needs of each individual can be understood and taken into account.

Many of our works strive to dismantle naturalized binarities such as nature–culture, human–animal, male–female, or body–mind. They offer perspective for us to better grasp the messiness and complexity that our world is made of. Our performances aim to offer information and experiences about connections, structures, and thresholds that overrun the boundaries of both individuals and singular performances. They ask how we can exist side-by-side with different beings and realities. 

Western stages are based on the human scale and are, in many ways, isolated from the worlds surrounding them. Our performances aim to find ways to rewrite this tradition by telling stories of multispecies realities and corporalities. Of signals overrun by noise. Of bodies that can be frail, limited, dependent on the relations around them, capable of blending into others. Hybrid and cyborg. Queer and reborn.

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