Make up productions is a Berlin based Performing Arts production company. Officially founded in 2004, we represent a body of works that has been developing continuously since 1992, and also includes music projects, films, video installations and publications.
We don’t revolve around one central director’s name. The activities and identities of the group of artists we represent are linked, through collaboration, economical or social contracts. Some members might share the same biological body. Yet we treat constructed bodies with the same respect as biological ones, because we presuppose the latter are constructions as well: behind the make up, we find no truth but true make up. read more >>
The work we represent falls in between categories of art genres, as choreographical, musical and theatrical performance, as well as categories of gender, as male and female identities. This falling in between is due to complex strategies of appropriation within these categories and conventions.
We appropriate a theatrical situation, like the pop-concert, the proscenium-theater, and we look at it as if in a mirror.
The relation between audience and stage may suggest a cultural concept, such as the contemplation of a landscape, the witnessing of an experiment in a laboratory, the zoo, the diorama, or the relation between fans and star. Or we treat the fourth wall, the imaginary wall that separates the stage from the audience, as a glass wall or a mirror reflecting on both sides.
We appropriate a chosen gender performativity for ourselves through cross-dressing, through drag, driven by our desire to construct who we are ourselves rather then letting society do this alone. We make ourselves up, we are dandies, old men, neuter of gender, drag kings and queens.
We appropriate professions, like choreographer, dancer, musician, names and biographies, in order to pursue our fantasies, achieve a better carrier and find a seat in the world. We research the fiction of everyday-life performance and the fiction of theater. We put on make-up, wigs, whiskers and jeans.
We play switching power-games of giving instructions and executing them and we look how it feels. We make temporary contracts with each other concerning collaboration forms or social structures.
We teach each other and we learn from each other. We invent each other and then we marry.
We treat our faces and bodies as mirrors and landscapes. We make a play watching it like a landscape or a face where feelings pass by like light weather changes. We make work that starts with ourselves. We ask ourselves what is it to be human, what is to be a human on display on a theater stage.
We laugh on command. We instruct ourselves to look sad, smile, walk, breathe, grab an object, stand.
We use ourselves as guinea pigs for human experiments. We play with control and being controlled. We make up secrets and tricks. We make up an audience and we look at it.
We make the pieces we would like to see and haven‘t seen yet.