THANK YOU FOR MAKING ME
THE ARTIST IM
(2009)
For this performance, commissioned by the curatiorial team of If I Can’t Dance Tonight, Ivana Müller invited a multitude of art practitioners for a contribution. She asked them to propose what they think she would or should do on the occasion of this new commission. It was the starting point for looking at the notions of ‘biography’ and ‘expectation’, through collectively developing the personality of an artist.
In the invitation letter to her contributors, IM stated: « For me the idea of masquerade has a lot to do with the notion of expectation: how we see somebody and what we expect from him/her. The fact that somebody calls you ‘conceptual’, or ‘choreographer’ or ‘theatre director’ or ‘young’ carries with itself a certain set of expectations.
All those different properties one is been described by (or calls one self with) constitute in some way her/his ‘artistic identity’, or if you want, her/his ‘mask’. This ‘mask’ is in some ways comparable with the idea we get of an artist after reading his/her short biography. It seems to me that a short biography is a piece of conventional writing that is always on the verge of fiction because through it, although it should mostly contain facts, we always have to (re)invent our selves. »
Ivana Müller was made by Bill Aitchison, Andrea Bozic, Katja Dreyer, David Weber Krebs, Gaëlle Obiégly, Bojana Kunst, Nils De Coster, Robert Steijn, Martin Kaffarnik, Paz Rojo, Barbara van Lindt, Frederique Bergholtz, Anna Nikisch, Lilja Bjork Hermannsdottir, Jihae Ko and many others.
Thank You For Making Me The Artist I M was perfomed on 16 June 2009, in Theater Frascati, Amsterdam (NL) as a part of the program If I Can’t Dance Tonight
Coproduction I’M’COMPANY / If I Can’t Dance Tonight I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution
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