Michael Laub

With his latest work Rolling Laub continued the disposition of intertwining film and theater on stage and conceived a play that was entirely composed out of over 200 film excerpts staged in a roughly two-hour piece. Im 2019, it premiered at Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) Berlin and toured ImPulsTanz Festival in Vienna the same year.

In 2017, following the world premier of Fassbinder, Faust and the Animists at Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) Berlin, the piece opened the ImPulsTanz Festival in Vienna.

Michael Laub is founder and artistic director of the artist in residency programme The Umbrellas of Phnom Penh (TUOPP). From 2017-18 TUOPP was a unique structure in Phnom Penh that accommodated residencies for international artists and local creatives from different fields of practice including visual artists, video/film makers, dancers, choreographers, sound artists and designers. In addition to his stage-work, Laub has held several guest professorships (at the University of Giessen, the Freie Universität Berlin, the Norwegian Theatre Academy), as well as a residency at HfG Karlsruhe in 2011.

2016 began with the opening of the solo performance Asutorito Endoruwaito (January) in Berlin's Hebbel am Ufer, which was followed by Dance Portraits - Cambodia opening at ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival and the Weltmuseum Wien (February).

After opening the Burgporträts (March) in 2011, Michael Laub's attentions shifted to the emerging arts scene in Cambodia. For the past five years he has embarked on a series of projects exploring traditional and contemporary Cambodian artistic expression. The Portrait Series Battambang began in 2012 in conjunction with Phare Ponleu Selpak, and culminated in the Galaxy Khmer tour collaboration with the rock band Cambodian Space Project, bringing these distinct voices to Europe two years later.

He opened 2010 with the highly personal, original composition Death, Dance and some Talk in Berlin (February), followed by Portrait Series Istanbul (April–May), Portrait Series Rotterdam (September), and commencing work on the Burgporträts at the Burgtheater, Vienna.

For the Laub portrait of the performance artist Marina Abramović in The Biography Remix (2004-'05), content called for a multi-layered format; "One moment you are watching the young Abramović on video, the next Abramović played by one of her young students, then Abramović in the flesh", but the object remained grounded in a very direct approach. While one critic noted that "above all one remembers authentic emotion, which culminated in the final glimpse of a smile from the artist. It is beautiful, very beautiful; terribly intimate; and perfectly universal." Libération concluded that "The Remix is generally as disturbing as it is moving". A quality one would anticipate, even aspire to, in a performance chronicling the life and work of an artist who has spent decades pushing the boundaries of physical and emotional endurance.

Between the large-scale productions of Total Masala Slammer and The H.C. Andersen Project, Laub directed Portraits 360 Sek at Hamburg's Deutsches Schauspielhaus in 2002 which was commissioned by Tom Stromberg. This was an undertaking which would spur his long-standing fascination with the applications of portraiture in theater to evolve. Having experienced success with solo portraits (Solo with Charlotte Engelkes, and Out of Sorts with Richard Crane), Laub began, with Portraits 360 Sek to extend the idea to a collective performance, and in time, a serialized concept.

It was only in the mid nineties, and in particular with the success of the play Rough, that Michael Laub/Remote Control Productions garnered international recognition. As a result, the ensuing works became more elaborate in scope and far-reaching in audience. An example of this was Laub's play Total Masala Slammer/Heartbreak No. 5 (2001), in which six months of research in India brought his fascination with Bollywood, Kathak dance and music into a synthesis with Goethe and Western contemporary live art forms. The H.C. Andersen Project (2003) was another ambitious project that used a multitude of biographical and literary interpretations in exploring Laub's take on the famous Danish subject. The Austrian daily Der Standard lauded the resulting mash-up, stating the play's "masterful blend of condensed fairytales, biographical notes, and exquisitely transfigured personae from Andersen’s universe is achieved through clarity of dramatic structure, the lightness of the 'show' form, the outstanding dancers and performers, and the subtle music of Larry Steinbachek".

With the founding of Remote Control Productions in 1981, Michael Laub proceeded to take his work somewhat closer to theater. Influenced by various forms, ranging from soap operas to classic literature and dance, his output as director of Remote Control Productions currently stands at over twenty plays. In what is perhaps something of an oversimplification of his extensive body of work, one can divide the material by three thematic approaches; the musical (Rough, Solo, Daniel and the Dancers, Total Masala Slammer); classic literature (Frank Wedekind's Lulu, Frankula, The Hans Christian Andersen Project); and portrait work (Portraits 360 Seconds, Out of Sorts, Alone/Gregoire, and The Biography Remix with Marina Abramović). One constant, since Rewind Song in 1989, has been the collaboration between Remote Control Productions and musician Larry Steinbachek, formerly of the band Bronski Beat.

Laub's career in the arts began in the mid-1970s when based in Stockholm, founding and co-directing Maniac Productions with Edmundo Za. Their work was referred to as innovative; mixing Performance art and Video installation. Genevieve van Cauwenberge observed that the performances "are in fact polyvalent and difficult to classify. They make use of everything at once, combining their specific language, stage direction, plastic arts (Minimal Art), musical composition (repetitive sampling) body language (Body Art), Happening (intervention of hazard) and of course the electronic video image."

Michael Laub (born 1953, in Belgium) is an avant-garde stage director and contemporary dance choreographer. His work has notably been shown at the Venice Biennale of 1984, the Festival d'Avignon of 2005, the Burgtheater in 2011, and several times at ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival and Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) Berlin. He has often been described as a minimalist and "one of the founding fathers of anti-illusionist theater".