"I am here." Philipp Gehmacher begins the narration "of the I" from his play „"incubator" thus. Is it a declaration? An order? A wish? A failure? Does the performer not, in uttering these words, also automatically proclaim: I am not here? Can you speak movement, spatial arrangements, bodily description in the form of a text and accept them as inscrutinizable descriptions of things beheld or does there not always emerge a rift between the spoken word and the things seen, a reference to the "impurity", to a "failure" on the part of the performance? A reference to a "wound", as Heiner Müller would have stated. Can you productively make use, in the terms of dance, of this space of this "in-between", this "not yet", this "gone already", of this openness, this space of the nullification of security and readability, where meaning still fluctuates and images still emerge? Is it possible to postulate instructions enabling the performer to create a spaceless space where he would, in dialogue with himself,, pose questions about the basest topics of his presence, regarding time as well as space? A poetical space? Man dwells poetically (Friedrich Hölderlin). An attempt in every case. A non-utopian Utopia.

Laurent Chétouane first studied engineering before going on to study theatrical sciences at the Sorbonne and stage direction at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main. He currently directs at numerous distinguished German houses, at the Münchner Kammerspiele, the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and at Schauspiel Köln, among others. Concurrently, he realises dance projects since 2006 - the "dance plays". Apart from this, he is also a regular guest lecturer at different universities.