Dangerous theatre actors
The VolxTheaterKarawane - their goals and practices

People are now being told everywhere that the VolxTheaterKarawane are harmless, innocent actors, and not dangerous and violent criminals. The opposite is true. The VolxTheaterKarawane are no harmless and innocent stone throwers, but utterly dangerous theatre people, since they had been intervening "on miscellaneous politic stages for years", according to the journalist Tina Leisch in www.prairie.at

Only a few, not even the journalists (and thus not their newspapers' readers, either), were offered an insight into the actual goals and practices of the VolxTheaterKarawane, even though the Karawane had been made into a media event in the weeks after the G8-summit in Genua, Italy.
Too many were simply too interested in the scandals surrounding this event, and many did not - without a few exceptions - spend any time on further investigations about the VolxTheaterKarawane, their backgrounds and intentions.

But the topic is not only interesting in the Austrian context. Several "Karawanen" have been travelling through Europe this summer, utilizing the framework of the international No Border-networks which were founded two years ago when the first signs of implemented Schengenpolicy could be noticed. Based on similar projects (like "no individual is illegal") the Karawanen visited places of political discussion and confrontation, and tried to establish a connection between them.
The members of the VolxTheaterKarawane thus see themselves as "part of a specific protest, which intends to articulate the concept of the campaign 'no border, no one is illegal' at places of politic confrontation, utilizing their means of artistical and political expression.”
The Karawanists want to convey an in-deep explanation of the campaign-related topics:
Isolationist policy, escalating neoliberalism, globalisation problems - topics that show up on all those places where the Karawanists travel by.

The important question that has to be tackled is thus: "What can theatre do, theatre as resistance, theatre as interference with public space?", says Karawanen-activist Gini Müller.
With this in mind, the VolxTheaterKarawane developed a countertemplate to the institutionalised theatre, even if the "classical" productions of the Karawane's "origin", the Volxtheater Favoriten, (with productions like the "Dreigroschenoper" 1994 or "Heiner Müllers Auftrag" 1997), were of exceptional quality and haven't found their match yet, according to Tina Leisch.
Beyond that shall the Karawane's activities (in Salzburg, Slovenia and Genoa, the destinations of their NoBorder-tour) also resemble an attempt to practice theatrical strategies of interference, of provocation and of attacks on power structures.
This is supposed to happen in the frame of a "work in progress" process - always documented in multimedia.

Günther Hopfgartner