The tenth Tonight featured Ivana Müller who presented a new performance titled Thank You For Making Me The Artist IM. For this performance, Ivana Müller has invited a multitude of practitioners to contribute through proposing what they think Ivana Müller would or should do on the occasion of this new commission. It is the starting point for looking at the notion of ‘biography’, and in relation to that, the working of ‘expectation’.
In the invitation letter to her contributors, Ivana Müller stated: “For me the idea of masquerade has a lot to do with the notion of expectation: how we see somebody and what we expect from him/her. The fact that somebody calls you ‘conceptual’, or ‘choreographer’ or ‘theatre director’ or ‘young’ carries with itself a certain set of expectations.”
“All those different properties one is been described by (or calls one self with) constitute in some way her/his ‘artistic identity’, or if you want, her/his ‘mask’. This ‘mask’ is in some ways comparable with the idea we get of an artist after reading his/her short biography. It seems to me that a short biography is a piece of conventional writing that is always on the verge of fiction because through it, although it should mostly contain facts, we always have to (re)invent our selves.”
Ivana Müller is born in Croatia and currently based in Paris and Amsterdam. Recent productions include Playing Ensemble Again and Again (2008), Into the Night (2006) and While We Were Holding It Together (2006). Ivana Müller is a founding member of LISA and tutor at the Piet Zwart Institute.
Thank You For Making Me The Artist IM is a new performance by Ivana Müller, coproduced by If I Can’t Dance and I’M’COMPANY.
Ivana Müller was made by Bill Aitchison, Andrea Bozic, Katja Dreyer, David Weber Krebs, Gaëlle Obiégly, Bojana Kunst, Nils De Coster, Robert Steijn, Martin Kaffarnik, Paz Rojo, Barbara van Lindt, Frederique Bergholtz and many others.
I’M’COMPANY is supported by the Netherlands Fund for Performing Arts.