Master-Symposium – Starting (again) from scratch

Starting (again) from scratch

The daily routine, the daily grind, the treadmill, is life just a string of repetitions? Tell us something new about yourself. Or just tell us something new. Taking the roles we take on and play in everyday into our own hands, imagening what we say about ourselves starting to help shape our roles. Would you like the chance to start again, to go where no one knows your name?
A workshop with Phil Hayes and Dominic Oppliger on playful fantasising, inventing, telling and retelling, pre-playing, re-playing and re-enacting, appropriating and denying different realities and daily repetitions, through unreliable narration, performance and writing.

Phil Hayes (1966) is a performance maker, performer, director and musician. He has worked in kitchens, restaurants, pubs, factories, on the radio, on television and on construction sites. He was born on the south coast of England and studied creative arts in Newcastle upon Tyne many years ago. Since 1998, Phil has lived in Zurich and spent most of his time creating performance and theatre projects such as Legends & Rumours, Love & Happiness and These Are My Principles... with First Cut Productions. Phil
has also often worked together with other artists and groups as a freelance performer, director, artistic consultant or musician. From 2009 to 2016, he worked together with the British performance group Forced Entertainment and has often partnered with the choreographer Simone Aughtlony. Phil Hayes also makes music with others in various constellations, such as together with Guz, as Phil Hayes & The Trees and Assignments. In 2013, he was awarded a cultural prize from the city of Zurich for his work on stage. In 2016–17, Phil was Artist in Residence at the Zurich University of the Arts. In 2020, Phil Hayes / First Cut Productions received a cultural award for the performance series Under The Influence I– III. Phil has taught, run workshops and supervised students at the Zurich University of the Arts and La Manufacture in Lausanne. In 2021, Phil was one of the theatre mentors for DOUBLE – a Migros culture percentage mentoring and coaching programme – and is currently mentoring in the Hewar Theater Company’s SO-LOW performance project in Alexandria, Egypt.
www.philhayes.ch

Dominic Oppliger (*1983 in Schlieren), author, musician and university instructor. He grew up in Aargau
and lives in Zurich. As a musician, he brought out several albums in the period to 2015 as part of different groups (such as Doomenfels), toured, picked up temporary work, gardened, obtained a Bachelor in Social Work and in 2014-2017 completed the Master in Transdisciplinarity at the Zurich University of the Arts. He also worked at the university in 2017-2023 and supported the MA in Cultural Publishing, serving as a research assistant and teaching for example creative writing and discussion of texts. He has also acted as an artistic consultant for performance and film and is the author of the novels act stumpfo züri empfernt
(2018) and giftland (2023), written in Swiss German dialect and published by Der gesunde Menschenverstand in the edition spoken script collection.
www.dominicoppliger.ch