May 2004. Frankfurt’s “Theater am Turm” is closed down: “dead city, dead theatre” – thus sounds the swansong of the avantgarde. Five performers dance a silly exalted Sirtaki, the dance of letters around the tower. It is the first major project of andcompany&Co., “for urbanites – after big cities,” short-circuiting TAT’s history in the neighborhood of Bockenheim with Brecht’s gold digger city, Mahagonny: when there is no more gold, i.e. culture, the gold-diggers move on.
The international artist collective andcompany&Co first moved to Amsterdam, then to Berlin, where they are currently artists-in-residence at Hebbel-am-Ufer (HAU). Their performances were staged at Brussels KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS (2007), steirischer herbst in Graz (2007), Wiener Festwochen (2008), Theaterformen (2009), Festival Impulse (2009), and Dortmund’s festival favoriten 08 – Theaterzwang (2008/10), where “little red” won the cultural award of North Rhine Westphalia and in venues all around world.

andcompany&Co. was founded in Frankfurt/Main in 2003 by Alexander Karschnia (author, performer and theorist), Nicola Nord (singer, performer) and Sascha Sulimma (musician and DJ). The name is programmatic, as it creates openness on both ends: it is understood as an open network of collaboration between artists from different fields – so far, for example, with author Bini Adamczak, visual artists Noah Fischer, Hila Peled, and Jan Brokof, composer Thomas Myrmel, MAE ensemble for contemporary music and Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung.

Part of the game is that collaborators are onstage as performers. In their laboratories, so-called &Co.LABs, andcompany&Co. develop small, fast projects together with variable partners. They are conceived as a test set-up for a collective artistic future. Their plays are storages of 20th and 21st century history: beginning with Mahagonny through the foundation of Europe (“europe an alien”, 2006), to a ‘trilogy of a reencounter with the 20th century’ about the history and end of communism (“little red (play): ‘herstory’”, 2006; “time republic”, 2007; “Mausoleum Buffo”, 2009) and the Hamletian drama of the hesitant prince (“showtime. trial & terror”, 2008) to the Native Americans’ fatal last summer (“West in Peace”, 2009), a ‘brasilianised’ Brecht (“FatzerBraz” 2010), an updated Lenz (“Pandämonium Germanicum: Lenz im Loop” 2011), a new version of the famous post-war-comedy “Aren’t we wonderful” with the Ensemble of Deutsches Theater Göttingen, an “Ark B.” with 20 kids and a historical Schiller-work on the coming insurrection in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

andcompany&Co. rummage our collective memories with an offensive strategy of associative bricolage. The pieces found in our culture’s attic create meaning only in connection with each other: The fall of the Berlin wall and the Beatles, Erich Honecker and Dagobert Duck, John Lennon and Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx and Karl May are knit into a thick referential system, a repartee of citations indicating genealogical connections. Thus, a polyphony of yesterday’s undead philosophical, political and pop cultural ideas haunts a theatre for the present moment which operates with networks and ‘dotcoms’, but without copy protection. Anything unearthed during research is reworked according to the musical principles of sampling and remix: cardinal directions indicating ideologies and utopias are sent through the shredder, are displaced and put into new contexts. Any play by andcompany&Co. is like a ride on the ghost train through the dumps of collective memory, and in repeating and disputing yesterday’s hackneyed philosophical and aesthetic ideas, utopia suddenly becomes possible again, if only in rags. Long forgotten phrases harbor new promises, and the power of language, i.e. its potential to create realities, is reexamined in post-postmodern fashion: “How to make Ernst with words?” (How to get serious with words), the 2006 Lecture-Performance “Kriegserklärung” (declaration of war). How can citations become serious, and acting-as-if turn into action? Thus, the very conditions of performing are put up for negotiation.

Their collaborative approach is closely related to the objects of negotiation. The artistic process practically produces utopia: it claims heterogeneity and openness, many collaborators have left their traces in andcompany&Co.’s theatrical language – and vice versa. And yet the trademark is always recognizable. Empty stages are textual landscapes and spaces of memory, where actions of performers sediment. They are playgrounds, collections of material and a wasteland of research results, where (almost) everything is handmade. The block lighting set consisting of bulbs and the like is managed by the artists, the complex sound system consisting of gongs, a children’s piano, singing telephone receivers and pre-produced remixes are controlled on stage: the stage machinery is performance. While it is switched on and off, stories are told and history is made. Speaking with Walter Benjamin, the journey leads into the future through remains and traces of the past: looking back forward! Thus, andcompany&Co. present a temponautical theatre with performers as voyagers through time, using timeline as a spring board into the future.