Faustian Walks: an interview with TAAT on their collaboration with students

Earlier this year, nearly 100 1st year students on Wimbledon’s BA Acting and Performance and BA Performance and Contemporary Theatre courses took part in a remote, collaborative project with experimental practitioners TAAT.

Standing for ‘Theatre as architecture, architecture as theatre’, TAAT was founded by architect Breg Horemans and theatre-maker Gert-Jan Stam.
They run projects internationally and their work sits across the fields of architecture, performance and artistic research. Their projects are often collaborative, designed to create encounters between audience members, institutions, practitioners, researchers and students.

For the project with Wimbledon students, participants were asked to organise walks for strangers in a local and accessible public space.
These walks and the interactions with the audience members were a way for the students to use the public space almost as they would a theatre. For example, to explore and experiment with the way different spaces allowed them to set up scenes that generate different meanings or outcomes.

This summer we spoke to Breg and Gert-Jan about their practice and the impact of COVID restrictions on their work, and why working with students is an important learning experience for them as practitioners.

To start with, please tell us about the work that you do as TAAT.

Gert-Jan (GJ): Breg and I are the founders of TAAT which started in 2012. With Breg coming from architecture and me coming from theatre and visual arts, we got really intrigued about the whole idea of space influencing performance, and performance influencing space.

So we founded TAAT as an artistic research project to explore those things and how performance theatre stands in relationship to the use of space.
One of the first projects we formulated was Hall33, where we said that the most extreme thing we could do is to make a theatre play that is a building. This has developed over time: we started working with building real frameworks for people to meet and these encounters became an important part of our work.

Now we do a lot of big scale installation-based projects in public spaces and in indoor spaces. We’re at the point of designing what we call ‘ecosystems of encounter’ - our work is always very process-based.

We call ourselves a ‘liquid collective’ - the size and the composition of the collective changes with each project. We like to involve people we've worked with before who were part of our projects, and we're coaching them to setup their own projects too.

You say that encounters between people is an important part of what you do – how has this been affected by the pandemic and lockdown conditions?

Breg: We immediately made a shift. Of course, all the venues that we would normally do a project in were be closed, so we thought, okay, how can we continue our work?

Public space was still available and people weren’t using it much, so these new conditions became our working field.

GJ: Yeah and I think what was interesting for us was that COVID also changed our perspective on our work, so that we started valuing it differently.
It was also a great way for us to really think about art as a discipline, art as a market and art as a system that we are part of as artists.

We had time to ask: how does that work? How do we want it to work and what is our position in that? We saw the art world as also being part of a capitalist system of exploitation, and thought how this would be the moment to change this.

Breg: We’ve been trying to explore hybrid forms of digital and analog spatiality for about a year. The project that we worked on with Wimbledon students is actually an example of how you can do a project long distance that still has a very big spatial component.

We asked all the students to organise 'Faustian Walks' for strangers in public space and to really see this public space as a place that you can work with, almost as a theatre.

What kind of responses did you have from our students to that kind of proposal?

GJ: This is a fun question because those responses have been very diverse.

I think we were brought in to give a completely different perspective. [The Wimbledon students] are mainly people who want to perform, who want to be on stage to act in front of an audience and this is, of course, not how we work. We hoped to bring a perspective of how you relate to these new forms of theatre that are becoming ever more important and present.

There were different kind of responses from enthusiasm to resistance, people being critical, people being curious.

We had a lot of interesting moments, some, I think, triggered by the lockdown. I mean, that was not a small detail in the whole process.

For them to be in a situation in which you are not the happiest and then again being asked to do something that is quite outside of your comfort zone was, I think, quite a challenge. But in the end we had some really amazing results and most of them were very glad that they went through the experience.

Doing art, theatre or whatever artform, you always have to deal with restrictions - whether with money, time or people. To stay creative and find opportunities, however limited the situation might be, I think, is an important characteristic to have as an artist.

Breg: In some ways it's a very hard time to be a student but on the other hand it's also a really good time, because the sort flexibility that you're being taught now, or that you learn for yourself, is going come in very handy in future years.

We’ve worked on a lot of innovative projects with students now, for example, people doing performances through WhatsApp with emoticons as a script.

I think the challenge is going to be finding a balance between the online and offline and to really find meaningful encounter spaces within this hybrid realm.

So I think these restrictions open up a lot of new possibilities; the question is, is the theatre industry going to embrace that?

How did  you become involved in working with students and what is the role of  that generally in how you develop your own work?

Breg: I wouldn't say they [the students] are just learning, I think we're all just learning - and learning is everything.

GJ: A lot of students think they are ‘just’ a student in that sense, so that's often a part of the work that we try to do - to empower them and to really think of themselves as equal co-creators in  the work that we're doing.

A lot of what we do is based on the idea of education, and that has its roots in the idea that this binary concept of theatre and architecture is based as an expression of power.

We try to think about how we create frameworks in which people can contribute as much as possible to learn from each other. This creates a different idea of hierarchy, which is also immediately about the exchange of information.

There's often the attitude of: “I am the one who knows everything and a student is someone who doesn't know anything yet.”

That's not the mindset we work with, especially working with international students for instance. There are other things that people know or experience, that people have, that we don't, and for us that's just as enriching.

Breg: I think probably that the greatest switch was from the physical building projects where we are together on site with students and experts, touching the material and working on it, towards this digital realm.

It’s a different approach because we get a lot of information in ‘doing’ together, creating a site for co-activity in which everybody's involved in their own way.

What happened in most of the groups [in this project] is that they were learning in a very balanced way from each other and from each other's comments. There was a lot of time that they were on their own as a group, so this immediately puts the learning or the pedagogy in their hands.

This shift of the power structure comes from the fact that the groups worked separately or in separate spaces. This is an example of where the spatial condition helps us to find a different kind of pedagogy in which you don't have to lean on somebody else's knowledge but in which you really have to do it yourself.

Working remotely over the last year - is this a new way of practicing for you that might continue? Now that there's more possibility to work physically again, how do you think you will take some of the practice that you've developed recently forward in the future?

Breg: Just before the pandemic we were already thinking about finding a sustainable way of outsourcing the practice and making it shareable. For instance, how could someone in Riga or in Athens do a project without us being there, as the founders of TAAT? What do we need to transfer in order for a project to live its own life without us traveling towards it?

This is something that is basically enhanced by the COVID situation - the only way to have a physical person present on site is to find people locally.
The network of students that we've built since 2014-16 actually helps to do that, because we work with a lot of international students. They now also have their own lives, professions and networks, so getting them involved in projects puts less pressure on the environment and on your own footprint and gives over a lot of power to people that work locally.

GJ: I think also something we liked about working with the Wimbledon students was the idea of a more social perspective: we call it ‘encounter activism’.

From this idea, it was really interesting to work with students worldwide and to have hundreds of people meeting each other all over the world through a chain of one-on-one relationships. That's something that we really enjoyed and definitely want to take further.

Breg: Through this opportunity we had people walking in Malaysia, neighbours that didn't know each other that were suddenly brought together by one of the students. We had people dancing in the streets of Beijing. There were people walking in Lima in Peru. We like to think of our audience engagement strategy as using personal connections, and the fact that this now happened through these students and their own projects locally is super exciting for us to see.

Watching the practice multiply through a university that has international students who are able to engage locally is maybe a step in the direction of a more sustainable theatre field or industry.

So after the pandemic restrictions lift, will you go back to doing some hyper-local work as well as international, and combine the 2? Are you keen to rediscover personal physical interaction and the dimension that gives to performances and experiences between, say, performer and audience member and between the performers themselves?

GJ: Definitely - we love this hybrid online way of working and expanding, but at the same time we miss on-site working with people which is always an amazing experience.

One thing that we would like to do is based on our experience at the John Soane Museum in London. Here we really got the strong impulse to have a specific place where we can work for a longer period of time - over a couple of years or decades maybe - because that would give another depth to the to the overall project.

Breg: Yes, but I think online working is more decentralised, in a way. I am really interested in the decolonial perspective coming into in the way you teach, finding new references and canons to bring into education.

In our evaluation with the Wimbledon students, we posed them the question: is the Anglo-Saxon canon of theatre the only canon that we should use? Surprisingly a lot of them said yes, this is the basis for so much so we need to learn it.

We were a bit surprised with this perspective but, on the other hand, the shifting of that perspective is something that we need to feed. I think by doing projects in this decentralised way we can start to change the idea of a of a very European-centred artistic canon in education.

What is it that you're going to be working on next, do you have another project that's coming up that you're immediately focusing on?

Breg: A couple of things: we're building one of our projects in Latvia and we're writing a lot of applications for what we call our ‘encounter portals’ which is going to be a sort of circular structure in which different sets of strangers meet each other in public space. We’re also doing some research, some publications, and some programmes in which there's more space for reflection and for discourse.

GJ: That was so interesting about the COVID pandemic: first of all, we got this global awareness but also, all of us ran into the limits of digital and online work. I think it is quite interesting that even young people get fed up of being on their phone or their laptop, you know? I think that's something that we will take with us.

• Visit the TAAT live archive for more about their work
• Find out more about BA Acting and Performance at Wimbledon
• Find out more about BA Contemporary Theatre and Performance at Wimbledon