HAU OUT LOUD

HAU: OUT LOUD took place September 23–25, 2022 at HAU1, HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin.

It was the Berlin realization of HOW OUT LOUD, STO Union’s modular project about why people gather, what a performance space is for, and whether the conventions of theatre still serve us.

At the centre of the project was a simple question:

If this theatre did not already exist, would we build it now?

HAU1 opened in 1908, long before the internet transformed how people communicate, gather and experience culture. HAU: OUT LOUD entered this historic theatre not simply as a venue, but as a structure to question.

Rather than asking audiences to sit in one place and watch a single event unfold, the project opened the building up. Video, sound, performance, Artificial Intelligence, drawings and installation occupied the theatre, while audiences moved through the space and constructed their own experience.

At the centre of the work were the fourteen Out Loud video portraits, recorded during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic — a period of extreme and imposed isolation. The participants had spoken about what they were living through, but in the finished portraits we do not watch them speak. We watch them listening to recordings of their own words.

Placed together in HAU1, the fourteen figures became something like a contemporary Greek chorus — except there was no chorus speaking in unison. All were responding to the same ongoing tragedy, yet each remained separate, with a different experience, interpretation and response. We hear their words, but watch them listening rather than speaking. Their voices seem almost like inner thoughts made audible. The possibility of a single collective voice — one of theatre’s oldest conventions — has fractured into fourteen individual responses to the same event.

This fragmentation echoed the larger question of the project. As HAU: OUT LOUD examined the relevance of a public performance space, some of the traditional strengths and conventions associated with such spaces — assembly, collective attention, shared experience, even the possibility of unity — were themselves beginning to fray.

Bringing these portraits, created during a period of extreme isolation, into a newly reopened theatre put the importance of gathering into sharp relief. The participants are physically present in the videos, but they do not speak the words we hear. Speech has become separated from the speaking body — another form of distance and mediation — while the audience is once again physically gathered together in the same room.

A.I. Ritual, developed with UKAI Projects, approached the question of gathering from another direction. Ritual has historically belonged to the world of bodies coming together in a shared place. Here, ritual was transferred into an encounter with an artificial, non-human system — pointing toward a world in which practices once grounded in collective physical presence increasingly risk being displaced into technological space.

The Empty Stage Drawings turned the question back toward the public. Beginning with drawings of the empty HAU1 stage, audiences were invited to imagine what they themselves wanted to see there. If the inherited performance space no longer automatically served a clear purpose, what might people ask it to become?

Claire Bestland’s sound work Frequencies shifted another theatrical convention. Rather than emanating from the stage, the soundscapes were played from the highest rows of seats in the auditorium. Sound came from the audience space itself. The usual direction of attention was reversed: the world of the performance emerged not from the stage toward the audience, but from the place normally occupied by those who watch.

Together, these elements asked what remains essential about live gathering and what a theatre might become if its inherited roles were no longer taken for granted.

Works and elements within HAU: OUT LOUD

HOW OUT LOUD
The larger modular project from which HAU: OUT LOUD developed.

Out Loud
Fourteen video portraits made over the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A.I. Ritual
An interactive work by UKAI Projects inviting audiences to engage with an Artificial Intelligence system.

Empty Stage Drawings
A participatory drawing project asking audiences what they would like to see onstage.

Frequencies
A sound work by Claire Bestland, played from the uppermost audience seating and filling the theatre from the audience space rather than the stage.

Videos in the Bar
Short video works presented in the HAU1 bar, including Hyperindividualism by Frozen Grapes.