Adaptations – Retrospective Video Lecture Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship Michael Laub

Belgian choreographer, performance artist and director Michael Laub will take on the Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin in the 2020 summer semester. Laub who has held the very first Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship in 2006/2007 will trace four decades of his endeavor in his opening video lecture at the Akademie der Künste.

From video to live action and performance art, from Wedekind to Bollywood, from classical dance to trash, from improvisation and the accidental to the obsessively structured, from the screen to the stage and back again. In Michael Laub’s multi-layered performances, adaptations from various media and epochs serve as a catalyst for autonomous strands that are transferred into carefully orchestrated staged pieces. By collaborating with highly-skilled artists as well as non-professionals, Laub is specifically known for crossfading his performer’s reality with fiction. He has gained recognition for his adaptations of portraiture to the stage, which he acquires by making use of realism as well as consequently superimposing the spontaneous with the artificial.

In the seminar, Michael Laub and the students of dance studies at the Freie Universität Berlin will investigate how video portraits could be transferred to the stage and how film can be possibly translated into a theater form. The results of this seminar will be presented on 8 July 2020 at the Akademie der Künste.

In cooperation with Freie Universität Berlin and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).