Sahar Rahimi, Dr. Kai van Eikels: Collective Work/Additional questions for Dr. Eva Högl, member of German parliament

You can’t make dance and theater by yourself. They are both forms that require collaboration. The utopian collective envisioned in Heiner Müller’s dictum “You can only make theater with friends!”, has long since become reality for many theater and performance collectives.

In this case, collective also means the shared ownership of the means of production and shared development of (alternative) social safety networks such as the models for provisioning for old age.

In the artistic processes as well, members of the collective hold artistic as well as non-artistic positions from authorship to direction and performance to design and technical elements, all without an hierarchy.

The collective seems to be turning into the new paradigm for artistic work. And we are very pleased that we have been able to bring together three special guests to talk about collectives: Sahar Rahimi is part of the successful performance collective Monster Truck and introduced a uniform salary at the beginning of this year, Dr. Kai van Eikels conducts research at the Free University of Berlin in this special field and shares his insights and thoughts on his blog very much worth reading.

As part of the production manager collective ehrliche arbeit, Sandra Klöss has supported numerous theater and performance collectives in creating and producing and will moderate this discussion. 

As many of the labor policy aspects of collective work are found more on the federal level than the state level, we are very pleased to have the Berlin representative to the Bundestag, Dr. Eva Högl, a member of the Bundestag's Committee for Culture and Media, available for questions on this topic following the discussion.

Moderation:
Sandra Klöss (Produktionsbüro ehrliche arbeit, LAFT Berlin)

Participants:
Sahar Rahimi (Monster Truck)
Dr. Kai van Eikels (Institut für Theaterwissenschaften, FU Berlin)
Dr. Eva Högl (Mitglied des Bundestages SPD)
Andrea Rohrberg (Unternehmensberaterin)