mites got no problem | 2002

Ten days of performances
Ten experimental premieres

A scenographer, a musician and a dancer come together to confront their individually prepared materials. Following a master plan, a new arrangement of these materials is made daily, one and the same base material delivering ten different pieces.

Each unique performance is recorded and progressively put together in a tv-installation documenting the evolving performance over the ten days.


Mites got no problem was a practical, experimental and systematic investigation of the possible formal relationships between the three disciplines proper to the members of C&H: Stage design, movement and sound.

The project was presented as a series of 10 successive performances, showing 10 different variations on the combination of the same stage, sound and movement materials. Each version made use of a different formal principle to organize the interrelations between the compositional elements. These formal principles, derived from music composition were – presence/absence, quality/quantity, synchronicity, combinatoric polyphony, cyclic polyphony, unity, duality, multiplicity and texture.

The exact definition of each performance was made on an every day basis, according to the experiences made of the preceding versions. The audience had access to all 10 performances (one per day) with one single entrance ticket.

In the entrance hall of the theatre venue, video documentations of the preceding days' performances were shown on video monitors, getting accordingly more numerous day after day. Allowing an overview of all the versions performed.


After their common experience in Fairytale Eaters (2000), Christoph Ragg, Christophe Meirhans and Heike Langsdorf chose to work together in a more concentrated way as a trio. Limiting the number of players and the disciplines involved allowed them to concentrate more on the possible relations between their different materials and to have a greater control over the final outcomes of their experiments.

Rather then work from a narrative, as they did in Fairytale eaters, they chose to base their respective materials on 12 elements – a choreographed sequence made up of 12 movements, 12 different sounds with which to compose and 12 scenography elements to use as interventions in the space.

The result was a controlled experiment which stayed a formal investigation into the possible combinations of set material. The trio chose to disrupt this otherwise clear process in two ways: The first, by reading the story of the life cycle of a mite at the beginning of each performance. The narrative colored the way the performance was subsequently viewed.

The second, by way of an extension of the ten day program, the trio performed the structure of day ten again, inviting an actor to intrude on the protected and relatively polished laboratory by simultaneously performing something of his choice, without coordinating it with them before hand.

The actor (and the narrative as well to a certain extent) functioned as an outside, defining that which the performance was not. Formal not narrative, structural not associative. But by being allowed to coexists with it's opposite, this outside necessarily influenced and colored the whole.

After Mites got no Problem the trio decided to continue working together, spawning the ongoing collaboration, C+H. With their next project, they decided to begin from meaning and association, as opposed to structure and form - using symbols, gestures and words as the point of departure.

(see cobaye vs. cobaye)





concept :
C&H
performance :
Heike Langsdorf, Christophe Meierhans, Christoph Ragg
special guest :
Steve Rage
film :
Heike Langsdorf, Willy Depp
support :
Nadine, VGC
thanks to :
Karl Wedemeyer, Michael Schmid, Yaron Shamir
support :
Nadine, VGC
network :
frogs OS