In his lecture, Akira Takayama will present two of his recent projects:
McDonald's Radio University is a project that transforms branches of the McDonald's franchise across a city into lecture spaces, creating a citywide university. The professors are immigrants or refugees who have had to leave their home countries, and the students are people who walk into a McDonald's and order a lecture along with a burger and a coke. The project was premiered in 2017 across seven McDonald's stores in Frankfurt, Germany.
Wagner Project (2019) is a 10-day 'school' that combines Richard Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868) with street culture such as hip-hop and rap. It was realized as a 'Hip-Hop Academy' and also as a 'temporary city' at Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt for pulling street performers (rappers, dancers, and graffiti writers) who usually work outside the theater into the theater.
Akira Takayama is a theater director and artist who embraces a broad range of non-conventional performance methods in a bid to expand the concept of theater within contemporary society. They include installations, touring performances, social experimentation projects, discourse events, sightseeing tours, videos, and many other approaches.
Der Vortrag findet in englischer Sprache statt.