Judging by the visible markers on the body of the other, we are used to conclude at first sight such categories as gender, social class, cultural and national affiliation. But what if external perception and self-perception are poles apart? Every expression, every judgment and every thought is informed by the knowledge and observations of others. The “other” helps decentralise one’s own microcosm, while at the same time also limiting one‘s opportunities for action. The other’s gaze ultimately refers back to oneself.

In Gazes That Matter, Magda Korsinsky draws on Sartre’s phenomenology of “the look” and Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial critique of the same in order to address the exchange of gazes between Black, white and people of colour with three performers coming from various artistic and personal backgrounds in a stage situation that can be equally viewed from all sides.

Projected onto the stage are not only the reciprocity and power relations of the gaze, particularly in theatre, which nowadays has long dispensed with the “fourth wall”, but also the virulent social friction surfaces of these gazes upon one another, which become visible in the current debates around racist vocabulary on stages, in newspapers and books, or refugees’ perspectives.

Magda Korsinsky has an interdisciplinary approach, using dance, theatre, and music to allow for the broadest possible spectrum of means of expression and intellectual approaches to shape the development of the production.