New perspectives, theories and practices: Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, for example, will continue to explore ideology, power and social behaviour in a long-term project running in Berlin. She launches her project at this year’s IN TRANSIT, and will present it at the next festival in 2009.

Joan Jonas (USA) The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things (Berlin Version)

In The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004-05) Jonas meshes five video projec- tions of performance, spoken word, sound, and image with objects and props in a stage-like space…. (read on)

Joan Jonas, the pioneer of performance and video art, will show her latest performance-video installation, which encapsulates the history of the genre over the past forty years.

The Goat Island theatre group from Chicago, which has explored various forms of expression such as performances, film, web art and diverse modes of relating to the audience during its twenty-year history, now presents its ninth and final production: The Lastmaker. Portuguese choreographer Vera Mantero relies on the virtuosity of the lips, tongues and teeth – rather than that of the arms and legs – in a piece that concentrates on linguistic movements. Marcela Levi from Brazil, who will also be appearing in Mantero’s project, will be giving two solo performances in which she sets her own body and a multitude of objects – from ‘soft objects’ to a bull’s head – in a poetic relationship to one another. Fine artist Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, who comes from the Philippines, performs in the opening parties with songs such as Absolute Exotic and videos such as Family Sha la la and Holy Wood. She will also be celebrating the end of the festival with an ‘re-enactment’, several hours long, of famous predecessors.

IN TRANSIT stands for the integration of theory and practice, the stage, a laboratory, lectures and talks with artists, as well as for encounters among the artists themselves and with the audience. In 2008, for example, the two Canadians, Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, will be examining – in the Laboratory and in a talk – the approach of ‘radical empiricism’ in relation to performance practice. In the lab, there will be encounters involving Tania Bruguera, the composer, DJ and music performer Shawn Greenlee, and Berlin choreographer Thomas Lehmen, among others. In the lecture series, the founding members of Goat Island, Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish, choreographer Gustavo Ciríaco and the philosophers and essayists José Gil and Ismail Fayed, will be ‘performing’ and giving talks. Several installation rooms will be open throughout the duration of the festival. The Berlin choreographer and performer Thomas Lehmen will receive visitors in his installation room, where he will not only talk with them about ‘learning’: together with the participants, he, too, will learn about novel perspectives. Last but not least, this year’s new interactive library completes the process-oriented platform exchange and communication.