Fake Lore – who`s that Girl?
In the 1960s, Fake Lore was an American “battle cry” employed field-specifically in a scholarly controversy ABOUT true folklore, the “real stuff”. Fakelore meant fake folklore. Hard to say what the “real stuff” ever was; deep in provincial Hesse, the Brothers Grimm discovered and wrote down the genuinely illiterate woman’s oral narrations of fairy tales. Although it soon came out that this was actually a well-read, upper-crust lady whose native tongue was French, the myth of Grimm’s Fairy Tales as a German folk national monument remained uncontradicted. Current research is more concerned with the production, the societal function, and the acquisition rituals of folklore, and that means asking whose nostalgic expectations and wishes attribute credibility to a particular cultural expression – despite constantly quoting, faking, and copying cultural forms. We regard the band Kraftwerk as the real German folklore!
The Mobile Academy Berlin 2004 is the successor of the international Theatre Academy Ruhr that was held in Bochum in 1999, and has now been moved to Berlin with a new thematic focus. The model of the Academy combines interdisciplinary course work with fieldwork, theory and activism. The MOBILE ACADEMY not only teaches techniques and methods of actual art production, but also experiments with strategies to avoid art and artistry: Learning always means to confront ones own prejudices.