# 2
In 1986 Rolf Langebartels began a series of particpatory Performances titled 'Table Concert'. A computer set on a high stand so all Performers can see relays instructions such as whose turn it is to play and for how long. The 'instruments' are decided upon by the players taking part. When artists from different backgrounds take part sometimes the Body acts as instrument alongside more traditional choices. A musical game takes place that swings between play, competition, and endurance, structured around improvisation and randomly generated time structures. The element of encounter and being with others is key to the 'Table Concerts'.
Table Concert with Personal Computer
The Table Concert is a game for several persons. There are rules which the players must accept if they want to join in the game. If they don't want to pay attention to the game rules, they shouldn't play.
The entire concert develops as a sequence of events of various lengths. Players can participate in some of the events, in others they are not allowed to take part. The computer program makes the decision. Since the program does not recognize the names of the players, it uses the numbers of the seats at the table to let them know when they should play. The chairs which stand around the table are numbered for this reason.
The computer screen shows when a performer is in line to play. When he sees his seat number - shown in large numbers - he can play for as long as his number is displayed onscreen. The numbers remain on the screen for the duration of the event. Only during the transition to the next event can the seat numbers change. When a player sees his number on the screen at the beginning of the next event he simply plays on. If his number is not shown any longer, he has a break until his seat number again appears onscreen at the start of one of the subsequent events.
In most of the concert events a player takes part in, he plays with other persons. But it can also happen that he plays an event alone, that is, a solo. In some of the events the word 'silence' may appear on the screen instead of seat numbers: then, none of the players are allowed to play. It means tacet, rest. I conceive of this silence as an additional player in my Table Concert, perhaps as an antithesis to the players.
These are the only game rules. What the players do during the concert events they participate in is left up to them. There are no rules and also no instructions. Their activities may be of a musical, theatrical, visual, literary or other nature. Everything is possible. Ordinary and festive, serious and flippant, professional and dilettantish, loud and soft, conventional and unconventional.... But players should nevertheless consider which of their activities mean enough to them to perform in public in a group with several other performers. They must find their own paths.
The general time plan of the concert (that is the sequence of events), the entrances of the players and also the duration of the individual events - all of these are determined by chance, which I have programmed into the personal computer. Its results are not predictable and also not reproduceable. Each performance of the Table Concert is in this sense unique. At the beginning of each concert event, that is in real time, the computer program, through a random generating function, arrives at the length of the upcoming event, decides how many will play in the event and selects the numbers of the players from among those present. The results can be seen immediately on the screen, and the new event begins. The point of change from one event to the next is thus often completely surprising and exciting.
I understand my Table Concert as an attempt at a warm 'social sculpture'. We have so often experienced how we sit with various persons at a table and it's all so arbitrary, without commitment and energy, a cold situation. The Table Concert gives players the opportunity to take themselves and their fellow players seriously for its duration. I have not fixed how they should play. They may react to their fellow players and try to play with them , or against them. They may also, however, play entirely independently of the other participants, according to what they have previously planned.
Between these two playing strategies there are certainly all kinds of hybrid forms and completely different ways of proceeding. With each Table Concert, I am always surprised at the new paths that players find and take. The wealth of discoveries that the players make - discoveries whose existence I had never imagined as I wrote the Table Concert - fascinates me. Perhaps the players think of their participation as a small adventure they want to plunge into for the duration of the concert.
translated into English by Andrea Lerner
Berlin, March 2002
So erschien es mir denn richtiger, erst einmal die Grenze zu überschreiten, um damit den ersten Schritt aus der Ordnung in das Ungeordnete zu tun. Ich hatte die Vorstellung, daß das Wunderbare, das Reich der sagenhaften Zufälle und Verwicklungen sich mit jedem Schritt deutlicher offenbaren würde, wenn man den Mut hatte, sich aus dem Gewöhnlichen zu entfernen - man mußte seine Anziehung um so stärker erfahren, je mehr man ihm entgegenging.
Es blieb mir aber nicht verborgen, daß jedem Zustand eine große Schwerkraft innewohnt, aus der sich heraus zuspielen der bloße Gedanke nicht genügt.
Ernst Jünger, Afrikanische Spiele, zuerst publiziert 1936
