“Verein zur Aufhebung des Notwendigen or One Hundred Wars to World Peace”

This performance is a dinner and it is about democracy. Not democracy as institutional engineering for mass organisation, but democracy as something we internalize, as individuals, at the level of our day to day existence. It is about democracy as the realisation of our individual and collective desires.

A meal brings people together, it is warm and convivial. Yet, food is also home to our most intimate convictions: existential, ethical, aesthetic, economic, social, ritual or religious. In other words, dinner is the perfect set for a political showdown. The kitchen will be our theatre of operations.

For the duration of the performance, and in many ways, all those present in a theatre hall form a community. In our case, this temporary community is given the untranslatable name Verein zur Aufhebung des Notwendigen, the club, or association for the abolishment, or lifting, or conservation, but also transcendence of the necessary, of the indispensable.

Each individual member will hold the destiny of the whole community in his hands. It is a shared responsibility. But spectators often disagree, they like different things and are ready to defend them. This performance is not about consensus.

It is sometimes said that we are what we eat. In this theatre piece, we will eat what we are and nobody really knows what that will taste like.

Christophe Meierhans (born 1977 in Switzerland) is a multi-disciplinary artist. Trained as a composer, his work comprises performances, public art interventions, video and media installations, short films and musical compositions. Meierhans works with and within the public space. His work develops strategies for interventions in our daily life protocols through the manipulation of conventional agreements, social habits and simple usages. His work attempts to raise questions about norms and conventions by confusing casual contexts with another and confronting the spectator with some kind of otherness, the strangeness of being in the „wrong“ place, or of the place itself being the „wrong“ one.

Premier on 16th April 2016.

After the first performance on 16th April 2016 there is artists´ talk with the audience.

This performance includes an evening meal. Please do not eat before the show, come hungry.

A House On Fire Project, with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

Supported by OmaPõrsas OÜ, PK Ilmarine hotell.