Agnes Scherer, «The Teacher» | Cabaret Voltaire | with Soya Arakawa, Claudia Barth, Tobias Textor

«The Teacher» by Agnes Scherer with Soya Arakawa (puppet play), Tobias Textor (music) and Claudia Barth (vocalist).

This film was recorded on 2 October 2020 at Cabaret Voltaire. Film and edit by Izidora L. The exhibition to the operetta was on view from 2 October 2020 until 30 April 2021 at Cabaret Voltaire. Thank you for the help Paul DD Smith and Laura Rodriguez.

In the work of Agnes Scherer (*1985), the operettas that she has been developing since 2015, occupy a unique position. Her unusual performance formats draw inspiration from basal theatre forms such as processions, the mechanical theatres of the Baroque period, and even from the form of PowerPoint presentations. Thereby, Scherer is interested in possibilities of liberating the work of art from the status of the passive object, and giving it a heightened agency. At the center of «The Teacher» stands a teacher figure, which is controlled by a student – performed by Soya Arakawa – laying on the floor, using his feet to control the figure by employing some quite formidable effort. The teacher is thus placed in a didactic frenzy, a kind of hectic dance that sometimes seems monstrous, sometimes seductive. His lessons are illustrated by large diagrams that fall to the floor in short intervals, in order to reveal something new over and over again. What the teacher presents sounds impressive and true but in fact, contradicts itself. The text, which is closely interwoven with Tobias Textor’s rapid percussion, consists of aphorisms that Scherer was partly told by authorities and partly wrote herself. Together, the texts analyse and demonstrate the rhetorical blueprint of so-called wisdoms and their manipulative potential.


Lyrics

If you think you understood it, you didn’t understand it! Be ready to make mistakes.
When you button up a jacket, always start from the bottom!
Before you pursue a plan, tell it to many. You don’t have to care about criticism.

Always remember: Wisdom and naivety are contrary forms of impermeability.

Whoever sees a city in the desert is usually lost. Those who see a desert city from an airplane are themselves part of an apparition.
The blind spots contain the truth, but concentrate on what is around them.

Wisdom and naivety are contrary forms of impermeability and permeability at the same time!

The truth is always outside of your eld of vision. Sleep and know!

Look and know!
If you cut something into three equal pieces, measure the third piece as well.

Be empty and know!
The less you are a reader of yourself, the more you are actually reading.
If you really read, you will notice that the exterior as an exterior arrives inside.

What you lack to really be yourself is the least tangible, and yet already a part of you!
Wholeness is incompleteness that is dreaming.

Your weaknesses have always been strengths in reality and you have been chosen for a prize from the very beginning.

If you took the last sentence as a promise, you have misunderstood it!
But exactly this experience is the most valuable! The best is retrieved from the deepest well!
Anyone who fails has missed the favorable moment with unconscious intent.
The bigger one is the smaller one and the smaller one is the bigger one!



Find more information on: www.cabaretvoltaire.ch/programm/the-teacher-3

Photo thumbnail: Gunnar Meier. «The Teacher» was shown for the first time in April/May 2019 at the Berlin project space Kinderhook & Caracas, curated by Sol Calero and Christopher Kline. The exhibition at Cabaret Voltaire was curated by Salome Hohl.