DRAMA
Residencies
- 29.09 > 03.10.2025
DRAMA is an eight-hour, large-scale performance project by Micha Goldberg and Rosie Sommers, created for the white cube. Not a site-specific production, not a performative interlude in a museum — but a radical inquiry into what it means to act, to watch, to preserve, and to feel within a space that usually imagines itself outside of time. DRAMA pulls theatre out of the black box and brings it, corporeal and emotionally charged, into the white cube.
After the bold mainstage production GERMAN STAATSTHEATER, created for the black box, Goldberg and Sommers now take on the museum as an institutional and dramaturgical space. Not to play theatre in the museum, but to set both systems against each other. DRAMA examines how the fleeting, emotional nature of theatre relates to the conserving, contemplative temporality of the museum. What happens when the “event time” of theatre begins to leak into the “exhibition time” of visual art? In doing so, the artists also question the current trend of using performance to “enliven” the white cube for an increasingly immersion-hungry audience culture of contemporary museums and art biennales.
We love drama. We love to watch confrontation, to create space for confrontation, and to bring it close to people. Both Micha and Rosie come from a performance based practice. We have performed closely to people in bars, festivals, and exhibitions. We love strong emotions. We love the power of the drama of theater, the way theater can make people feel the drama of incest, the drama of murder, the drama of break-up, the drama of suicide, the drama of politics, the drama of society, the drama of institutions, the drama of gossip. We love the theater’s intense emotional work. We want to enter inside and perform these emotions, bringing them close to and making them immersive for our ‘witnesses’ (visitors).
This project is a temporal challenge as much as a spatial one. The structure of traditional theatre is based on architecture: beginning, middle, end. It is linear, framed, finite. The museum’s temporality is open, asynchronous, continuous. We are questioning whether the deep emotions of repertoire theatre like grief, ecstasy, anger and catharsis can still exist in a space where there is no fixed beginning or end. When the audience is free to drift in and out, to stay or leave, does the drama lose power? Or does it become something else, more ambient, more mysterious, more haunting, more sensational, more real, more contemporary?
van Rosie Sommers & Micha Goldberg met Dorelia Schraeven, Milan Mitera, Ward Weemhof, Rosie Sommers & Micha Goldberg productie KWP Kunstenwerkplaats coproductie De Warme Winkel