Oliver Zahn

The choreographic-discursive performance essays by Oliver Zahn cleverly deal with the subjects of history, nationalism and the body. His latest work was created during the lockdown for the Zoom videoconferencing platform. It is the result of an intense research that Zahn began in an ethnographic sound archive on the expulsion of Germans after the Second World War. In this archive, he stumbled upon a song in which a displaced person sings about his experiences of displacement, escape and arrival in his new home. Zahn, himself a descendant of displaced persons, traces his own biographical voids regard to this topic and develops the thesis of so-called strategies of collective forgetting. The work is created live on the desktop, as the central place of current knowledge production and access gate for the World Archive that is the Internet.

After the performances there will be an audience discussion in the chat.

Oliver Zahn (*1989) studied direction at the Bavarian Theater Academy. His essay performance about the (art) history of a burdened gesture, SITUATION MIT AUSGESTRECKTEM ARM, which he created during his studies, has already been performed at numerous festivals in Germany and abroad. In Theater Heute's critics poll, he received the 2015 award for best up-and-coming director for this work. This was followed by SITUATION MIT DOPPELGÄNGER on cultural appropriation in dance, imitation and minstrel shows (2015, with Julian Warner), ZWEITER VERSUCH ÜBER DAS TURNEN on belonging to the »nation‘s body« based on the history and practice of the German gymnastics movement (2017/18, as HAUPTAKTION together with seven collaborators), as well as the first part of LOB DES VERGESSENS, which premiered at the Munich Kammerspiele in 2019. Oliver Zahn's works have been presented at important festivals in German-speaking countries (e.g. Tanzplattform, steirischer herbst, Donaufestival, SPIELART, IMPULSE) and at major venues (e.g. HAU, PACT, Hellerau, Kaserne Basel, Münchner Kammerspiele) and are touring worldwide.