Maximilian Haas , Sandra Umathum

Förderung von Nachhaltigkeit

Systemische Potentiale der Kunstförderung

„Transformationen der Theaterlandschaft“

Symposium, Akademie der Künste Berlin

02.11.21

Maximilian Haas , Sandra Umathum

Embracing Sustainablility

Ideen, Initiativen, Konflikte in Produktion und Förderung

Bundesforum der Freien Darstellenden Künste

Radialsystem Berlin

16.09.21

Maximilian Haas 

Realisieren

wissenderkuenste.de 

Ausgabe #10

Mai 2021

Wirklichkeit ist nicht gegeben, sie muss realisiert werden. In den Künsten kann sich diese Realisierung auf die geführten Prozesse der Aisthesis und Poiesis stützen. Sie konstruieren Wahrnehmungsereignisse, die Realien auf besondere Weise verwirklichen. Einigen Facetten dieser Besonderheit soll anhand von performativen Auseinandersetzungen mit anthropogenen Umweltkrisen nachgegangen werden. 


Vortrag im Rahmen der Podcast-Reihe Das Wissen der Künste ist ein Verb.

Maximilian Haas & David  Weber-Krebs

Speculating about Donkeys

Tanzquartier Vienna

28.03.2014

The lecture explores the relationship between contingency and speculation in artistic work with animals, a field in which choreographer David Weber- Krebs and dramaturge Maximilian Haas have been active since 2011 with their performance series Balthazar. Balthazar is an artistic-scientific project that explores our cultural relationship with animals through the means of theater. It confronts an animal - the living donkey Balthazar - and a group of human performers on stage. Insofar as an animal performer on stage behaves in a fundamentally different way from what is expected of him, the production and reception of such performances requires a high degree of speculation on the reactions, intentions, and states of consciousness of an unequal and unpredictable partner.

Maximilian Haas 

Animal Agency

Gerrit Rietveld Academie 

De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam 

20.03.2015

Higher animals resemble humans in so many ways that philosophy and art have always felt obliged to determine the differences. Western modernity even considers man and animal to be opposites. It is only the human being who possesses language systems, consciousness and social manners, characteristics distinguishing us from the animal. Whether as the zoon politikon, the animal rationale, or – in essentially modern terms – the body-machine that thinks, there is unquestionably one thing man is not: an animal amongst animals. Man has an exceptional position among other worldly lifeforms, which is marked by the distinction between intention and instinct.


Reality is divided into two worlds: we inhabit one world, they inhabit the other. Ours is called culture and is created by free subjects, while theirs is called nature and contains living objects which, however, are without any cognition or will. Empirical encounters with animals, especially in the reinforcing frame of (contemporary) art and theatre, draw a very different picture: Usually the works do not simply show an animal, but always this one animal. Lending their motifs both face and figure, an individual aura, they invite the beholder to speculate about the subject’s biography, character, emotions and passions. In short: they lend the animal subjectivity and highlight its (non-human) agency.