Michael Laub

Michael Laub (born 1953, in Belgium) is an avant-garde stage director, contemporary dance choreographer and video artist. His work has notably been shown at the Venice Biennale of 1984, the Festival d'Avignon of 2005, the Burgtheater in 2011, and several times at ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival and Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) Berlin. He has often been described as a minimalist and "one of the founding fathers of anti-illusionist theater".

Laub's career began in the mid-1970s when based in Stockholm, founding and co-directing Maniac Productions with Edmundo Za. Their work was referred to as innovative; mixing Performance art and Video installation. Genevieve van Cauwenberge observed that the performances "are in fact polyvalent and difficult to classify. They make use of everything at once, combining their specific language, stage direction, plastic arts (Minimal Art), musical composition (repetitive sampling) body language (Body Art), Happening (intervention of hazard) and of course the electronic video image."

With the founding of Remote Control Productions in 1981, Michael Laub proceeded to take his work somewhat closer to theater. Influenced by various forms, ranging from soap operas to classic literature and dance, his output as director of Remote Control Productions currently stands at over thirty plays. In what is perhaps something of an oversimplification of his extensive body of work, one can divide the material by three thematic approaches; the musical (Rough, Solo, Daniel and the Dancers, Total Masala Slammer); classic literature (Frank Wedekind's Lulu, Frankula, The Hans Christian Andersen Project); and portrait work (Portraits 360 Seconds, Out of Sorts, Alone/Gregoire, and The Biography Remix with Marina Abramović). One constant, since Rewind Song in 1989, has been the collaboration between Remote Control Productions and musician Larry Steinbachek, formerly of the band Bronski Beat.

Many theater critics have noted the convention challenging nature of Laub's work. When reviewing Daniel and the Dancers one writer commented that "the theatrical illusion has been destroyed, and what is happening on stage is simply a new reality." Deconstructing theater, finding novel ways in which to reconfigure the elements of a performance, is what fascinates and distinguishes this artist. A review pertaining to the same piece in the Danish newspaper Politiken attributes a certain violence to this theatrical approach. "This is masterful comedy," writes Monna Dithmer, "-served by the Laub diva Charlotte Engelkes-and a masterclass in the Laub technique, the aim of which is to smash the whole theatre process into bits and pieces and display them in all their naked glory."

It was only in the mid nineties, and in particular with the success of the play Rough, that Michael Laub/Remote Control Productions garnered international recognition. As a result, the ensuing works became more elaborate in scope and far-reaching in audience. An example of this was Laub's play Total Masala Slammer/Heartbreak No. 5 (2001), in which six months of research in India brought his fascination with Bollywood, Kathak dance and music into a synthesis with Goethe and Western contemporary live art forms. The H.C. Andersen Project (2003) was another ambitious project that used a multitude of biographical and literary interpretations in exploring Laub's take on the famous Danish subject. The Austrian daily Der Standard lauded the resulting mash-up, stating the play's "masterful blend of condensed fairytales, biographical notes, and exquisitely transfigured personae from Andersen’s universe is achieved through clarity of dramatic structure, the lightness of the 'show' form, the outstanding dancers and performers, and the subtle music of Larry Steinbachek".

Between the large-scale productions of Total Masala Slammer and The H.C. Andersen Project, Laub directed Portraits 360 Sek at Hamburg's Deutsches Schauspielhaus in 2002 which was commissioned by Tom Stromberg. This was an undertaking which would spur his long-standing fascination with the applications of portraiture in theater to evolve. Having experienced success with solo portraits (Solo with Charlotte Engelkes, and Out of Sorts with Richard Crane), Laub began, with Portraits 360 Sek to extend the idea to a collective performance, and in time, a serialized concept.

For the Laub portrait of the performance artist Marina Abramović in The Biography Remix (2004-'05), content called for a multi-layered format; "One moment you are watching the young Abramović on video, the next Abramović played by one of her young students, then Abramović in the flesh", but the object remained grounded in a very direct approach. While one critic noted that "above all one remembers authentic emotion, which culminated in the final glimpse of a smile from the artist. It is beautiful, very beautiful; terribly intimate; and perfectly universal." Libération concluded that "The Remix is generally as disturbing as it is moving". A quality one would anticipate, even aspire to, in a performance chronicling the life and work of an artist who has spent decades pushing the boundaries of physical and emotional endurance.

360 Sek and the ensuing Portrait Series projects (there have been five to date) eschew almost all theatrics and strip the performer's role down to often uncomfortably intimate biographical details. "By linking the unstructured with the well-calculated, the director subtly conveys to the audience some idea of those elements of which theatre is composed: exuberance and effort, yearning and application, happiness and fear. Yet because the individual portraits are so direct, as an exercise in vanity this self-portraiture remains modest. The quietly non-intentional gets the same six short minutes as the noisily exhibitionist, and that is why, in the final resort, the theatre emerges victorious as a powerhouse of the imagination as opposed to a factory of personalities." The focus is on realism and authenticity. This is made all the more evident with Laub often favoring non-professionals for these projects, as their untrained stage personae are all the more vulnerable and raw.