Norbert Klassen

Norbert Klassen (born May 30, 1941 in Duisburg, Germany, died December 1, 2011 in Bern, Switzerland), was an actor, stage director, influential performance artist, educator and organizer of performance art festivals. He has lived and worked in Bern, and contributed significantly to making the city important for the contemporary performance art scene.

Klassen trained acting at the Westphalian School of Acting in Bochum. His first engagement in the years 1963/64 was as a theatre actor at the Theater Aachen. He had since been active as an actor and stage director, among others at Studio am Montag, Bern; Bern Theatre; Komödie Düsseldorf; Kammerspiele Düsseldorf. He maintained links to the theatre world throughout his career, but his work received more acceptance within the performance art circuit, and Klassen identified himself primarily as a performance artist. He was inspired by Fluxus and Living Theatre. In his first performance, My Red Brother, Klassen sat at a table holding a cigarette and watching the smoke rise, an action that he repeated in his performances through the years.

Klassen had a black star tattooed on this bald head. The tattoo was result of a performance in homage to John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. This performance consisted in the action of the artist having his head tattooed inside a train station in 2008.

Klassen’s work had been influenced by a multitude of co-operations with international artists from the backgrounds of acting, music, visual art and intermedia. He participated in numerous events by the international performance art network around the world.

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