Tagtool @Mapping Festival

16, 17 and 18 May – Geneva.

Three days of intensive Tagtooling at the Mapping Festival – which was a really great experience for us but unfortunately there wasn’t time to write up the blog on a daily basis – so now it’s ‘catch up’ time for me as usual!

As an introduction to the three days of performances and workshops at the Fonderie Kugler where the Tagtool programme took place, first there was a fanfare from Ritsche and then Maki presented a short ‘history’ of the Tagtool.
The two photos below show Maki and Itzi giving the very first ‘live’ public demonstration of their new Tagtool Touch for the Mapping Festival audience.Audience interest was immediate – instead of asking questions about the new app, people were lining up, eager to try out the Tagtool Touch for themselves!
At the Thursday and Friday morning Tagtool workshops there were further opportunities for people to find out about the new Tagtool Touch as well as playing with the ‘oldschool’ Tagtools – and as the photos below show, this was obviously a very enjoyable experience for both children and adults alike!
During all of the performances lots of people in the audience were taking both photos and video. As usual, I took photos for the blog with my little camera, but only when I wasn’t drawing – and sadly, most of my photos are not very good.I made this collage of musicians Ritsche and Steve Buchannan and the drawings in the background are by Maki and Itzi. This session is from the first of the Tagtool Anthology programmes, where we all took turns to draw and play together in some ‘oldschool’ Tagtool jam sessions. This was serious fun for all!

Each evening the performances ended with an hour long solo session from one of the featured artists. On Wednesday we performed as Libusin Posse (plus animation by Itzi) and K.U.N.T.Z. providing the music. Dima set up our video camera but unfortunately his card ran out half way through the performance…… so I was very pleased to find online this photo from the second half of our programme to use as an illustration for the blog. It’s by one of the Mapping Festival photographers, Evdokia Reymondin.

(The Mapping Festival website has a big gallery of photos covering all the days of the festival – do check it out to see some really high quality images that give a very good overview of the festival events.)

On Thursday there were two performances that I was really looking forward to see. The first, by RZM (Ritsche, Zasd, Marien and Maki), combined music, live action and movement, Tagtool and painting with pigment. Although I have seen videos of their physical theatre works I had never seen them perform live and, as so often happens, the live performance was a different order of experience entirely – I was mesmerised! In addition to the actual physical movement of the performers I found the interplay between illuminated surfaces and painted surfaces, the combination of pigment and Tagtool drawing, was particularly interesting – so I took lots of photos…
The second Thursday ‘featured artist’ performance was by Dieter Puntigam to music by Trudi Pelikan. His dazzling repertoire of kaleidoscopic images kept the audience spellbound – and again, my photos don’t come near to capturing the quality of this truly virtuoso performance!

On Friday Dima deserted his usual position behind the computer and played guitar on stage during the afternoon jam session and later joined K.U.N.T.Z. with me and Puntigam in the Anthology Session.

This session began with a solo performance by Margaret Unknown.
Jan and Itzi are drawing at the Tagtools.

The grand finale on Friday evening was ‘7 sessions’, a set of improvised live animation episodes from the Tagtool originators, Markus Dorninger and Matthias Fritz (Maki and Itzi). Together with Philip Zoubek (piano) and Christian Reiner (voice) this performance, which featured a cast of Maki and Itzi’s Tagtool characters both old and new, provided the ideal ‘happy ending’ to the three days of artists’ performances at the Mapping Festival.
From left to right: Maki, Itzi, Philip and Christian.
Here are some stills from their delightful and engaging performance…
Above – the red pig – one of my favourite characters…
….the performance wouldn’t have been complete without an appearance by Hilti
…..or the bee Seppi!

I will have some videos from our performances in my next posting but I will end this one with a big ‘thank you’ to all the members of the Festival technical team who helped to ensure that we had such a great time in Geneva at the Mapping Festival!