Ursula Sax in interview with Cornelie Kunkat, consultant for Women in Culture & Media at the German Cultural Council The sculptor Ursula Sax (1935) began her studies at the age of 15 at the Staatliche Akademie für Bildende Künste in Stuttgart. At the age of 21 she received her first public commission. This was followed by many successful competitions, in particular works in metal, wood and stone related to architecture and urban space for public buildings and squares throughout Germany. Her most famous work is the large yellow looping, which was realized in 1992 between AVUS and the Berlin Exhibition Grounds. In HELLERAU she shows at the festival “Appia Stage Reloaded” the Geometric Ballet as homage to Oskar Schlemmer. I have to start with a compliment: you look incredibly fresh, and your age, 83, is definitely not to be seen. Of course, you know what it means to get older. But I don’t have the feeling that you are old. Well, I realize of course that I am old, purely physically. When shopping or walking on the street, I’m not so fast anymore. But I also often feel ageless, for example now. Then I just forget how old I am. And as an artist, do you have the feeling that you are approaching your work differently now? Yes, more relaxed. I no longer put myself under pressure. I don’t have to prove anything to myself anymore. I would never have “had to”, but that’s the freedom with freelance artists, that it needs discipline, day after day. I was my own client and as such I was often merciless. I’m not that anymore. Since when do you have this greater calmness? Quite a long time. At least since I gave up my beautiful studio in Radebeul and came back to Berlin six years ago. So the pressure gradually decreased. Let’s talk about the unusual beginning of your career. At the age of 15 you have already started your studies. How did this come about? My father was a primary school teacher in a village in Württemberg. He was highly educated because he studied throughout the war. He did not have to go to war because of a stiff leg. When the war was over, he again became a primary school teacher in our village, where he impudently determined that I had to go to him in the primary school and not, like my older sisters, in the secondary school in the next town. At first I suffered a lot from this decision, but then I adapted and in the afternoon I drew with him in the fields, the village, the trees, the family members and what do I know. Finally the question arose: What will become of Ursula? By chance there was a Berlin painter who had been evacuated to the village and who suddenly sat on the meadows and painted – but with oil and easel. I became friends with him. He then reported on a transitional school in Stuttgart, the Steinbeis Gewerbeschule für Kunsthandwerker. I finally went there once a week for a year. The teacher was very impressed with me and gave me tasks for the week. Later I attended a nude drawing course. The teacher there also said: “They are very talented. My father-in-law is a professor at the art academy. Why don’t you show him your drawings? Due to a lack of telephone, I simply drove to the academy without prior notice. The professor in question was on an excursion, but I showed my work to someone else who was in charge of the preliminary sculpture class and he said: “Yes, I’ll take you as a guest for one semester. And then we show your work to our colleagues. If they agree, we’ll take you in.” That was a big exception, after all I was only 14. So how did sculpture take the place of painting as a subject of study? Yes, I actually wanted to study painting, because I didn’t even know sculpture. Everyone has pictures on the walls, painting, you know that, but you don’t have sculptures in your apartment. But shortly before that I had been with my father at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. The Lehmbruck exhibition there left a deep impression on me: there were life-size figures, bronze women to walk around. I was enraptured, so I spontaneously decided to do sculpture. You were certainly always the youngest in your studies? Yes, I was the youngest everywhere for many years. How many women were studying with you at that time? Many. But they didn’t get far, because many married a colleague pretty quickly and became mothers. At the same time the men constantly emphasized that women had no place in sculpture anyway, even if it was wonderful to have them as fellow students. Did you know from the start that you didn’t want to get married? I always wanted to get married. So had grown up in. But then I realized that we as women in the field were not taken seriously. That meant that from the beginning you had to do twice as much as the men. I was married twelve years later, but children were out of the question for me. Because I was simply obsessed with my artistic work. In my opinion, art didn’t allow me to take care of a family at the same time. I have seen many examples of how colleagues who had a child could no longer devote themselves sufficiently to their art: The child cried a lot and the man refused to support her. I, too, was influenced by the idea that intellectual work was a man’s business, that you had to do an awful lot to be recognized, and that men make fools of themselves when they change children. I had also internalized this idea at that time, as had my husband. What was your mother’s attitude? She accepted it that way. One of my two sisters, who was an actress, had my mother run the household for a long time so that she could combine work and marriage. But she has no children either. My other sister studied piano, but was the only one not to continue it, because she had children and travelled abroad a lot with her husband. In 1957, when you were just 21 years old, you got your first job. How did you manage to keep your creativity and energy burning over this long period of time? You can’t do something like that. It results. The first, but not well paid order I got in Berlin, a wall piece for the Studentenwerk. The 300 D-Mark I got was just enough for the material from the scrap yard to produce the model. In the course of your career, you have worked with many different materials, and a wide variety of work groups have been created. How do you describe their red thread? I am the red thread. I have always done what I wanted, what I felt inside me. But when a material phase came to an end – and I didn’t jump around without a plan, but worked through every material thoroughly – then there was a point at which I thought: no more. Or once the newspaper said: “The Berlin wood sculptor Ursula Sax”. So I thought it was time to stop. I never wanted to be put in this or any other drawer. However, my way of working made life very difficult for me. Because both the gallery owners and the public demanded that an artist stick to his last. A lifetime of stone, a lifetime of bronze, what do I know? Fortunately, that’s different today. If you look at Gerhard Richter, he’s allowed to do the most disparate things, and so are the less known artists. Wasn’t it perhaps because you were ahead of your time that you were easy for gallery owners? You can’t say that yourself. Perhaps so, as far as the language of forms and the use of materials are concerned. It was simply my thoughts that I followed. Would you like to be forty or fifty again today? No. Because that would be too exhausting for you? I don’t have the feeling I missed anything either, I travelled a lot. Of course there is an infinite amount that I haven’t seen, but I don’t grieve for it. What are your current projects? I’ve seen you do another competition. Yes, that’s how it turned out. It was brought to me, but it’s not a big deal either. I’d like to do another really big sculpture like the yellow loop at the Berlin Exhibition Grounds. In Dresden I did a long ceiling work in the Albertinum in 2011, but unfortunately it no longer exists. I regret this very much because this work has always been close to my heart and I simply love large formats. What exactly do you like so much about large formats? That you can breathe a sigh of relief and that you can help shape a piece of the world. In this context, I hope that my work, which I don’t find sufficiently appreciated myself, will be seen more in public and given its place in the professional world. How did you deal with these or other disappointments in your life? What gives you the strength to keep going? The fact that I am still alive and feel is even more. Spirituality has also kept me very busy over the years. I wasn’t aware of that when I was twenty, but it was already there. In a difficult time I finally began to meditate, and I have kept that up to now. I was also often in India, in an ashram with a group of yoga teachers. I looked around intensively, but I didn’t stay there. How did you experience your time as a professor in Berlin, Braunschweig and Dresden? It is a great pleasure to see and lead these young people. To see how they develop from the entrance examination to the end of their studies. To help them to discover themselves, to accompany them to their own individual character. That is wonderful. But of course it is also the task of the teachers to point out to the young people that they may not be sufficiently gifted. This is painful but often very helpful, because then they have to make a conscious decision to continue or to find something more suitable for them. Would your life have been different if you had been born thirty or forty years later? Surely I would have taken a different path. But that is not interesting. I am satisfied with the possibilities I had. That is, you don’t look back with bitterness, but accept that you had to work harder than your male colleagues for your success? I had to accept that. I even thought it was normal. Because through my father and other intellectual men for whom I was raving, I had internalized the feeling that as a woman I was not worth so much or that I had to exert myself unbelievably. When did you have the feeling that you as a woman are on a par with your male fellow artists? My self-confidence has grown steadily, for example, by winning competitions to my astonishment that otherwise only men took part in. And so, of course, I have slowly internalized that men are not superior to women per se in artistic or intellectual terms. As a result of their long, prolonged creative time, they have to witness your sculptures being destroyed because some buildings have been demolished and the value of your art has been disregarded. How do you deal with it? That was an astonishment the first time. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for the new buildings of an era to become obsolete within a few decades and for the art created in this context to be cleared away as completely worthless. Since I was familiar with a group of successful newcomer architects, I received large commissions for interior design, especially in Berlin until the 1980s, and won and realized art-in-architecture competitions. It saddens me that their houses and my works are no longer worth anything, are simply cut away and no one cares about art. Even the public sector does nothing. Of course, many things were tailor-made for the structural situation, so that it was difficult to use the sculpture, the fountain or the wall work anywhere else. But there was no regret at all on the part of the new owners or the administrations to destroy cultural assets. This is a testimony to the poverty of our time and frustrates us. What kind of exchange do you have with professional colleagues? I did my work on my own. But I have been in close contact with Eberhard Bosslet, one of my colleagues at the Kunsthochschule Dresden. Through my gallery owner Semjon, I also get to know younger female artists again and again, such as Ramona Zipfel, Birgit Sauer and Claudia Busching, who I find interesting because they dock with the natural sciences. Do you also provide impulses for your own work? Rather not. The inspiration comes from life. I like to visit salons very much. These are always stimulating encounters, when many clever people get together on a topic, listen to an expert and then discuss. Of course I go to exhibitions and vernissages, and I also like to go to the theatre. For many years I was a close friend of stage designer Martin Rupprecht, who died some time ago. He was a very lively spirit. We did a lot, he advised me, a top friend, who unfortunately is no longer there. Which moments have brought you the greatest happiness? A real luck for me was the mentioned work in the Albertinum in Dresden. It was 21 metres long and really succeeded, and it was created out of sheer impossibility. Because there was not even the wish on the part of the Albertinum to have a sculpture in the large hall. In addition, there was no money or permission to install anything on the floor or walls. Bit by bit I had to work my way up – an uncanny satisfaction, even if I didn’t earn a penny. How do you live now? I still make art, but I sell it little. But I have a pension from the professorship, for which I am very grateful. And then I sold my house in Dresden – that’s my financial background. So I can lead a quite pleasant and free life. Were there times when you sold a lot on the art market? No, I didn’t sell much on the art market and I never had any luck with galleries, up to now at Semjon. Even if someone had exhibited me before, nothing was sold, and that’s why a second exhibition rarely followed. The fact that things went so badly with galleries is also due to the fact that, as I mentioned at the beginning, I had very different work phases to which they and their customers didn’t want to or couldn’t adjust. But the commissions for public space, they fell to me from the very beginning. I had a very good relationship with architects, was a guest in their offices and had a say in everything, right up to juries, in which I was involved a lot after all. With great pleasure, because it offered me an interesting alternation to the isolated studio work. Were you the only woman in the juries? There were always other women in Berlin, but in Bonn I was often the only one. Did you differ in your judgement from your male colleagues on the jury? No, you can’t say that. We always had to judge the existing applications, and then it depends more on whether you have the same wavelength with the men and women. What was always important to me was that the jury was really open-ended, discussed and therefore came up with a satisfactory result, which was not always the case. Argument and counterargument, looking at things from a different angle and coming to a new result together – that’s the interesting thing about the exchange about art, whether at university or in juries.

Hungarian-born László Moholy-Nagy is known as a formative painter, photographer, designer and director of the Bauhaus. His revolutionary achievements as a media pioneer are probably less well known: as early as 1923 he worked on shellac records with linocut tools and thus used the still young medium of records for experiments: “Moholy-Nagy saw the musical future in records. But he protested against using it only as a means of reproducing performances. We experimented together, let them run backwards, which resulted in surprising effects, especially with piano records. We drilled them eccentrically, so that they did not run regularly, but ‘eated’ and produced grotesque glissando tones.” (Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt 1923) “Tribute to László” follows Moholy-Nagy’s curiosity not only to use new media as new means of reproduction, but also to understand them as new tools for creative work with works by the label RASTER and Claudia Märzendorfer, among others. At the same time, the record is celebrated, which mysteriously stands for archiving and tradition as well as for the fragile and transient. RASTER. is one of the internationally most successful labels in the field of experimental music and electronic arts, in the “RASTER. Labor”, artists* explore the dynamic and mysterious fields of generative composition in minimalist installations. For “Tribute to László”, a vinyl hardware setup by Byetone and Mieko Suzuki is presented in HELLERAU. The day before, RASTER. invites to the Long Night of Electronic Music on September 13 at the APPIA Stage: After “RASTER. electric campfire” had been a successful festival format at the Villa Massimo in Rome for ten years, it will now take place for the first time in Germany after last year’s guest performance at Peterhof (RU). The artist Claudia Märzendorfer from Vienna has been presenting “Frozen Records” since 2005 in various settings at international music festivals and institutions. “Frozen Records” thematizes in a fascinating way the disappearance, the filigree and tenderness in art, but especially in music. The ice records produced in simple but protracted processes, which can only transmit sounds to the audience for a short time in a performance before they dissolve and fall silent again, are not only a medium but also a sculpture: monuments of the age of technical reproducibility at the moment of recognition of transience.

ACTIONS is a stage and action project of the Dutch, Swiss and French artists* Yan Duyvendak, Nataly Sugnaux and Nicolas Cilins. The basic idea is the concrete negotiation of an urgent problem in the city in connection with the subject of migration in the form of a theatrical assembly. The author* team and the HELLERAU team analyse the special conditions in Dresden in the areas of migration, coexistence and work through research in advance. Specialists* working in these fields will be interviewed. The script for a unique theatre performance is created from the material. ACTIONS wants to offer new perspectives and help to find concrete solutions in a complex field. ACTIONS is a documentary theatre and social forum on the border between art, politics and action. Nicolas Cilins: The working method for the ACTIONS project is collective. How important is the idea of collaborative work for this project? Yan Duyvendak: ACTIONS is a concept that moves between performance, theatre and documentation. It’s a discussion format that uses documentary theatre tools and is based on a script. What is important is the intensive preparatory process with the specialists from the city. The performance ACTIONS lasts no longer than one hour, the discussion of the evening is staged, follows a certain dramaturgy, and it must be ensured that each*r participant*does not leave his own role during the discussion: Citizens*, politicians*, volunteers, authors* and fugitives remain themselves. What are the main ideological, social and political issues raised by ACTIONS? The problems associated with the reception of refugees are not a matter for individual states, legislation, the commitment of civil society or even a question of resources. This is what puts us in a strange and hopeless situation. And in this situation, the project opens gaps. Thanks to the different events and experiences within the performance ACTIONS that has taken place so far in Italy, Greece, France and Switzerland, we can say that in every country, every city, every municipality everything is different: the laws, their interpretations, rules, material limitations, stories and obligations of each individual. Perhaps, despite all the differences, the human factor alone cannot be reduced. ACTIONS works on a border: that of activism. What preliminary work is taking place and how are the different actors of the project brought together? The special feature of ACTIONS as a play is that it is rewritten with each performance. The various participants discuss the most urgent local issues. This urgency is defined in advance with the active local partners. We conduct interviews with the various participants together with one or two journalists. Then we write the script, which should capture the essence of the problem. We discuss this draft again with the participants* and then perform the staged discussion in public with the final script. How has this structure developed between interview protocol and documentary theatre? We have built the work empirically and adapted the process to the sensitivities and special needs of each person. At the same time, we try to identify and filter out the most important problems. It is a balancing act, and at this point the format is interesting. It avoids heated debates because everything has been noted down in advance and everyone has agreed in advance. We have of course thought about this structure and such a structure is only possible through many approximations. Despite the exact procedures and format, failure during the performance is also possible. It is an exciting, extremely complex work because it takes place at the same time on the conceptual, political, social, human and formal level. What role does the medium of theatre play in the face of political, social and real questions? Just because something real is happening here doesn’t mean it’s the representation of reality. That is the exciting thing about this form of performance. As far as the medium “theatre” is concerned, we try to find something archaic, something that connects us with politics.

ACTIONS is rewritten with every performance.

“Work, education and training are essential systems of social integration and inclusion, which serve not only to secure livelihoods, but also to promote participation in society as a whole. It is therefore also essential for migrants* and refugees to be actively involved in these areas and to contribute their share. The framework conditions for access to prerequisites such as language acquisition, catch-up education and other integration opportunities are strongly influenced by the residence status and country of origin of refugees. In addition to being excluded from “uncertain” residence status (during their stay in so-called anchor centres or initial reception facilities, during the asylum procedure or in the case of “toleration”), migrant women are often unable to work in occupations acquired in their home country. Support by the employment services is not granted because the length of stay stated in the papers is too short or because the conditions for participation do not “fit” or only “fit” on paper to this target group. Far too often complex legal situations still present considerable obstacles to fair participation in good gainful employment in Germany and thus deny fugitives the human right to work. Ultimately, there is also often a lack of support from people in the surrounding area who could provide tutoring or assistance in coping with the demands of vocational school, during vocational training or when graduating from school – with an interrupted educational biography. Andre Kostov, project coordinator for technical and content-related programme support for labour market mentors in Saxony at the Saxon Refugee Council and partner of HELLERAU at ACTIONS

“4:3 Kammer Musik Neu” focuses on music and occupies, connects and interrogates spaces – musical, architectural, social, private and political. In 2019, Rebecca Saunders and Ragnar Kjartansson are two artists* who have developed very different artistic approaches and languages on the one hand, but whose works “Stasis” and “The Visitors” on the other hand impressively illuminate common themes: What spaces does music open or develop, what roles does an audience take on, how does it shape the space and the musical situation? “Stasis” by Rebecca Saunders is the broadest work in a series of compositions that explores both the spatialization of different musicians* and the formal connection and collage of individual pieces of chamber music. Sixteen musicians* are divided into chamber music groups of various instrumentations, positioned horizontally and vertically, some of them outside the performance space. Each of the independently composed modules explores a strictly reduced sound palette. Different musical threads are formally connected, creating a complex polyphonic web of sound surfaces: A sound sculpture is projected into the performance space. An abstract music theatre is created in which the musicians* inside are the protagonists* inside a common musical environment or a common sound landscape.” This is how Rebecca Saunders describes her work and then comes to the short story “Still” by Samuel Beckett. “Turning his head towards the sunset, the unnamed protagonist observes the onset of night, the increasing darkness; his head slowly and gently supported by his hands, he waits for a sound as the darkness spreads out. The metaphors of darkness and light, silence and sound, movement and silence permeate the fragile fabric of his language. As stretched into all eternity, the timeless melancholy is short, hard and honest, yet permeated by humanity and tenderness. A stasis; the human body remains in a state of expectation, trembling.” Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson is a filmmaker, painter, sculptor and musician – and a magician of slowness and repetition. In “Raw Salon: Ein Rohspiel” he played 27 variations of a scene at the Berlin Volksbühne together with actors over five hours, in “Krieg” he let an actor die various deaths for one hour, and at the 2009 Venice Biennale he painted a daily portrait of his friend over six months in a dilapidated palazzo on the Canale Grande. Ragnar Kjartansson’s elegiac video composition “The Visitors”, which can now also be seen in HELLERAU after stops in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Los Angeles and Milan, is a hymn to romantic love and its bitter failure and an homage to the artist’s favourite band of the 1970s – ABBA – whose album of the same name marked the end of their career in 1981. The festive meeting of an eclectic group of musicians* and Kjartansson’s closest friends* at the dilapidated Rokeby Farm in Upstate New York becomes the phantasmagoric background for the staging of a deeply melancholic musical performance. Based on the setting of the poem “Feminine Ways” by Kjartansson’s former partner Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, the cinematographic tableau shows nine protagonists, who each perform the song in separate settings on nine large video surfaces arranged in a room: A pink rose, in the glittery frost, a diamond heart, and the orange red fire Once again I fall into my feminine ways You protect the world from me, as if I’m the only one who’s cruel, you have taken me, to the bitter end Once again I fall into my feminine ways. Rokeby Farm on the Hudson River is part of a strip of land of historic estates whose buildings date back to the colonial era and above all attracted landed gentry, industrial magnates and notorious personalities who built their lavish estates there. “The Visitors” captures the extended moment in which Kjartansson and his companions* take over the feudal manor house of Rokeby Farm with their performance. Attracted by the romantic flair of neglect and the eccentric inhabitants* of the house, Kjartansson and his guests stage a “feminine, nihilistic gospel song” – Kjartansson’s very own genre of musical contradictions. They occupy different interior and exterior spaces, each occupying a distinct, highly picturesque backdrop, each playing a different instrument and singing the melody of the song as if to themselves. Only in the exhibition space are the nine individual interpretations united into a harmonious orchestration and a spatial overall picture, in which they can be experienced simultaneously on nine video screens in the room. The audience – and only the audience – can thus experience the individual voices as a harmony and witness a permanent state of transience and impermanence, a virtual space of community, a mysterious musical space of melancholy, beauty and longing.  

Mary Gelman is a documentary photographer and sociologist from St. Petersburg. She has won numerous competitions including Leica Oskar Barnack Award, Istanbul Photo Award, Andrei Stenin International Photo Contest second place and the HELLERAU residence at Portrait – HELLERAU Photography Award 2019. What are you working on during the residence in HELLERAU? I am working on my new project, “Acts of Acceptance of the Body”, for which I took photos of women, couples and families in Moscow and St. Petersburg who are discriminated because of their weight by different structures and by different groups in Russia. During the residence I would like to go one step further and combine the medium of video with the themes of acceptance of a body, culture of shame and the influence of food culture. What do you pursue with the project “Acts of Acceptance of the Body”? The project will not be a guideline, but rather an invitation for a different approach to the subject of the body. I have had very personal conversations with various women, where they have shown me activities that helped them to feel harmony with their bodies and to break out of the cycle of shame felt for their bodies. How would you describe your way of working? In my project about fatphobia I investigate the culture of shame. What pressure do beauty norms and the food industry exert on the acceptance of one’s own body? I investigate these interrelationships through collected narratives. I practice a collaborative method with the participants in which we enter the process of creating a picture or video together. Artists from the fields of dance, theatre, performance, new music and media can deepen working methods, conduct artistic research, develop concentrated projects and exchange ideas with other artists within the framework of the Residence Programme. HELLERAU offers artists a place to live and work on site. The residencies are awarded directly to artists* from the region and at home and abroad whose artistic work is supported by HELLERAU and to whom a long-term working relationship is established. In addition, the residence programme is internationally linked with various partner institutions such as the Goethe Institutes in Istanbul and Québec, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Stiftung Kunst und Musik für Dresden and other cultural partners. HELLERAU is involved in the working group of German international residence programmes. In addition to working on its own artistic projects, HELLERAU also facilitates contact with the regional scene and thus promotes an exchange of artistic perspectives and working methods. Dresden cultural partners such as the media festival CYNETART and dgtl fmnsm in the field of digital art and the PORTRAITS – HELLERAU Photography Award in the field of photography are part of the residence programme. Rosa Müller, responsible for the residences in HELLERAU, spoke with three resident artists who had already been to HELLERAU or who will be working here this season.

Agata Siniarska produces performances, readings, lectures, videos and television programs. She is a founding member of Female Trouble and co-founder of Pinpoint TV. Her current project is a research around forensic choreography and embodied archives. In HELLERAU you worked on the project “Second Nature” for the festival “Erbstücke”. Who was part of your team? I developed the concept for this project with Karolina Grzywnowicz, who created an installation of soil, plants and trees on the portico of the Festspielhaus. With the dancer Katarzyna Wolinska we worked on the movement material and Mateusz Szymanowka was the dramaturge of the project. What did you do during the two stays? During the first residence I worked conceptually on the dialogue between choreography and installation. In the second residence we rehearsed concretely how the performance and the installation correspond with each other. Therefor HELLERAU is an excellent place to work and suitable for various forms of working modes. What themes are you currently dealing with in your work? I’m currently working on the choreographic reconstruction of the process of the extinction of the species – as a temporally and spatially dynamic landscape of death. By using and transforming the tactics, tools and strategies of the art and research agency Forensic Architecture, I am in the process of creating a “forensic choreography”. Artists from the fields of dance, theatre, performance, new music and media can deepen working methods, conduct artistic research, develop concentrated projects and exchange ideas with other artists within the framework of the Residence Programme. HELLERAU offers artists a place to live and work on site. The residencies are awarded directly to artists* from the region and at home and abroad whose artistic work is supported by HELLERAU and to whom a long-term working relationship is established. In addition, the residence programme is internationally linked with various partner institutions such as the Goethe Institutes in Istanbul and Québec, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Stiftung Kunst und Musik für Dresden and other cultural partners. HELLERAU is involved in the working group of German international residence programmes. In addition to working on its own artistic projects, HELLERAU also facilitates contact with the regional scene and thus promotes an exchange of artistic perspectives and working methods. Dresden cultural partners such as the media festival CYNETART and dgtl fmnsm in the field of digital art and the PORTRAITS – HELLERAU Photography Award in the field of photography are part of the residence programme. Rosa Müller, responsible for the residences in HELLERAU, spoke with three resident artists who had already been to HELLERAU or who will be working here this season.

Amy Bryce (GB) 2018/19 Amy, award-winning graduate of the Royal College of Music London, is a composer living and working in London. She features as an artist frequently in the UK and abroad, most notably with Tête-à-Tête Opera, at the Darmstadt Musikinstitut, Musiikin Aika (Finland), and at the Leeds Lieder, Bloomsbury and Cheltenham Music Festivals. Amy, you have been selected by the Stiftung Kunst und Musik für Dresden as Composer-in-Residence for three months. What did you work on during this time in HELLERAU? I spent most of the time conceptualizing the immersive opera “A Kinder Society”. I’ve also worked on my own performance art, some of which was performed during the TONLAGEN Festival as well as in Dresden and Leipzig. What did the time in HELLERAU mean for you? Above all, I appreciated the freedom to develop ideas and it was wonderful to dive into the community here and experience different artists in the program every week. It was a nice mixture of old and new. Julia Mihály, for example, was here at the TONLAGEN Festival, whose fantastic work I’ve been following since the Darmstadt Festival Courses last summer. My absolute favourite was Meg Stuart with “Until our Hearts Stop”. Will you be in Dresden again? Yes! I can’t wait to be back next year to premiere ‘A Kinder Society.’ I also have exciting plans with some collaborators in Dresden’s contemporary dance scene so I’ll be returning in due course. Artists from the fields of dance, theatre, performance, new music and media can deepen working methods, conduct artistic research, develop concentrated projects and exchange ideas with other artists within the framework of the Residence Programme. HELLERAU offers artists a place to live and work on site. The residencies are awarded directly to artists* from the region and at home and abroad whose artistic work is supported by HELLERAU and to whom a long-term working relationship is established. In addition, the residence programme is internationally linked with various partner institutions such as the Goethe Institutes in Istanbul and Québec, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Stiftung Kunst und Musik für Dresden and other cultural partners. HELLERAU is involved in the working group of German international residence programmes. In addition to working on its own artistic projects, HELLERAU also facilitates contact with the regional scene and thus promotes an exchange of artistic perspectives and working methods. Dresden cultural partners such as the media festival CYNETART and dgtl fmnsm in the field of digital art and the PORTRAITS – HELLERAU Photography Award in the field of photography are part of the residence programme. Rosa Müller, responsible for the residences in HELLERAU, spoke with three resident artists who had already been to HELLERAU or who will be working here this season.

Hans Ulrich Obrist im Gespräch mit der Choreografin Meg Stuart über Rituale, Improvisation und Ekstase. Gekürzte Fassung; der vollständige Artikel erschien im Magazin der Kulturstiftung des Bundes # 30 Frühjahr/Sommer 2018

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Ekstase, Transzendenz und Ausdauer sind spannende Themen, weil ich denke, dahinter steckt die Idee, dass Kunst eine Art Portal ist, durch das man hindurch muss. Aber erstmal möchte ich dich fragen, wie es bei dir alles anfing. Wie bist du zu Tanz und Choreografie gekommen, gab es da eine Art Erweckungserlebnis?

Meg Stuart: Ich bin im Theater aufgewachsen, das spielte sicherlich eine große Rolle. Meine Eltern sind beide Theaterregisseure. Viele Theaterstücke zu sehen, Tänzer und Schauspielerinnen genau beobachten zu können, das hat Eindruck hinterlassen. Aber irgendwie wollte ich nie mitspielen, keine Charaktere darstellen, sondern ich wollte ich selbst sein. Zunächst habe ich viel Sport gemacht, bin gelaufen, das Körperliche war wichtig, und so kam es, dass ich mich immer mehr dem Tanz angenähert habe, und irgendwann ließ ich das Laufen sein. Und dann bin ich in einen Tanzkurs in der High School gegangen, in dem es nicht darum ging, zu lernen, sich wie andere zu bewegen – obwohl ich auch das getan habe –, sondern eigentlich um Choreografie. Da habe ich choreografische Studien gemacht – stehend, sitzend, liegend –, habe die einzelnen Körperteile, den ganzen Körper rauf und runter untersucht. Und dann fing ich irgendwie an, mir Tänze auszudenken, bevor ich wirklich wusste, wie man tanzt. Ich hatte keine Technik, die ich später wieder hätte verlernen müssen, sondern musste vielmehr eine Struktur und Technik um mich herum erst aufbauen, um die Dinge umzusetzen, die ich mir vorgestellt hatte. Ich habe damals alternative Techniken ausprobiert, aber natürlich auch die „modernen Meister“ studiert: Cunningham, Graham, Limón. Ich weiß nicht, ob man das eine Offenbarung nennen kann, aber so habe ich angefangen.

HO: Du kommst ursprünglich aus New Orleans …

MS: Ja, ich stamme aus New Orleans, aber meinen Durchbruch als Künstlerin hatte ich beim Klapstuk Festival in Belgien mit „Disfigure Study“ (1991), da war ich 26 Jahre alt. Bis dahin hatte ich schon eine Reihe von kleineren Studien in New York gemacht, die dann in „Disfigure Study“ zusammenkamen. Mit diesem ersten abendfüllenden Stück hatte ich dann einen Fuß in der europäischen Szene.

HO: Deine eigene „Sprache“ hast du also erst in Belgien wirklich gefunden. Das erste Stück von dir, auf das ich aufmerksam wurde, war „No Longer Readymade“ (1993). Das traf auf große Resonanz in der Kunstwelt. Was hatte es mit „No Longer Readymade“ auf sich?

MS: Es war mein zweites Stück, und vielleicht entstand es aus einer Krise heraus. Ein zweites Werk machen, während ich auf Tournee mit dem ersten war, sehr schnell viel Aufmerksamkeit bekommen, aus New York wegziehen und in die europäische Festivalszene reinkommen – das war ganz schön viel auf einmal. Das Kernstück dieser Arbeit ist ein Solo. Ich grabe mich durch den Müll in meinen Taschen, Quittungen und Münzen und solche Sachen, ich schütte sozusagen die Überreste eines Lebens auf den Boden. […] diesmal war es eine ganz neue Beschäftigung mit der Frage: Here I am, what now? […] Es war das erste Mal, dass ich physische und emotionale Körperzustände erforschte. Das Stück beginnt damit, dass der Tänzer, Benoît Lachambre, seinen Kopf für etwa 4 1⁄2 Minuten heftig schüttelt und dann fieberhaft gestikuliert. Dann fängt er wieder an zu zittern und macht das Ganze rückwärts. Er ist völlig außer Kontrolle, er verschwimmt wie in einer Art Bruce-Nauman-Video, er geht an seine Grenzen, aber er artikuliert sich in diesem Wahnsinn. Als wir anfingen, diese Szene zu proben, übergab er sich im Studio. Erst nach vielen Proben war er schließlich imstande, sie durchzuführen. Es war das erste Mal, dass ich mich für Fieber oder Schweiß interessierte – könnte das eine „Sprache“ sein? Wie nutzen wir diese Art von unfreiwilligen Körperreaktionen als Tanzmaterial? So begann ich, mit physischen und emotionalen Zuständen choreografisch zu arbeiten.

HO: Dieses Stück scheint über das Rationale hinauszugehen, irrationale Kräfte kommen ins Spiel. Andrej Tarkowskij sagte einmal, dass wir Rituale wieder einführen müssen, weil sie in der modernen Welt verschwunden seien. Interessant ist, dass Ekstase in indigenen Kulturen und auch in einem rituellen Kontext als etwas sehr Positives angesehen wird. Aber im Kapitalismus und in unserer globalisierten Welt hat man irgendwann angefangen, sie negativ zu konnotieren. In deiner Arbeit hat sie eindeutig eine positive Konnotation. Ich habe mich gefragt, wann das in deine Arbeit eingeflossen ist. Als du damit anfingst, muss das ziemlich ungewöhnlich gewesen sein, oder?

MS: Ich denke, aus westlicher Perspektive sind Rituale Dinge, die wir aus Gewohnheit tun, wenn auch nicht aus freien Stücken, aber wir sind ständig mit Ritualen beschäftigt. Wir erschaffen sie für uns selbst – wir sind gezwungen, bei denen der anderen mitzumachen, wir sind ständig von Ritualen umgeben. Es geht also darum, sie anzuerkennen, aber auch, sie neu zu erfinden. Wir werden täglich von dem beeinflusst, was wir sehen, unser Bewusstsein wird mit Informationen überschwemmt. Die Frage ist, wie gehen wir damit um, wie machen wir uns davon frei, welche Gedanken gehören uns, welche nicht, und wie können wir mit diesen Kräften arbeiten? […]

HO: Sehr beeindruckend ist auch dein Stück „Until Our Hearts Stop“ (2015), das ich in London sah. Das hat auch mit diesem anderen Zustand zu tun. Denn dort benutzt du, wie auch in den früheren Stücken, oft den Begriff der Erschöpfung, und wie Erschöpfung zu einem transzendentalen Zustand führen kann …

Erschöpfung ist entweder ein Wunsch oder ein Problem, aber sie kann auch eine Strategie sein, um Kunst zu machen.

MS: … oder zu einem Nervenzusammenbruch (lacht). Aber ich glaube, dass wir auch gerne erschöpft sind, ich glaube, dass Erschöpfung ein Zustand des Im-Moment-Seins ist, es ist unser neoliberaler Modus, diese Idee des Immer-Arbeitens. Es geht auch darum, durch die Erschöpfung hindurchzugehen, um einen höheren Bewusstseinszustand zu erreichen, wo subtilere Frequenzen mitschwingen. Erschöpfung ist entweder ein Wunsch oder ein Problem, aber sie kann auch eine Strategie sein, eine Strategie, um Kunst zu machen. Du sagst zu jemandem: Sieh dir das an, sieh es dir an, jetzt sieh es dir nochmal an, und wieder … nein, dieses Bild ist noch nicht fertig. Diese Intensität, diese Besessenheit, in der man die Zeit dehnt und die Menschen dadurch zwingt, hyperpräsent zu sein – darin sehe ich im Moment die Verantwortung der Kunst. Darauf zu insistieren, dass wir uns darüber Rechenschaft ablegen, wo wir sind.

HO: Wo siehst du die Grenze zwischen Tanz, der auf der Bühne zur Aufführung kommt, und rituellen Praktiken, wie die der Schamanen oder Shakers, die jenseits einer Bühne stattfinden?

MS: Beim Tanz auf der Bühne werden eine Reihe von Prinzipien oder Regeln mit einem Publikum geteilt. Bei schamanischen Praktiken und Ritualen geht es um bestimmte Ziele und das Wohl der Gemeinschaft. Schamanen werden von Geistern in andere Welten geführt, um Menschen aus der Gemeinschaft zu heilen. Das ist ein Dienst an der Gesellschaft. Wenn Menschen am Wochenende in Clubs feiern gehen, dann ist das eine Art improvisiertes Tanzritual, bei dem es um Begegnung, Loslassen und gemeinsam erlebte Momente der Ekstase geht. Dennoch herrscht sogar an Orten wie dem Berghain in Berlin ein relativ starrer Verhaltenskodex. Ich kann mir deshalb gut vorstellen, dass es in Zukunft immer mehr hybride, undefinierte, offene Orte geben wird, an denen man gemeinsam tanzen, loslassen, sich artikulieren kann und dadurch Strategien der Bewältigung und Heilung schafft. Ich hoffe, dass der Tanzkongress in Dresden so ein lebendiger, unkonventioneller Ort wird für kollektives Handeln und gemeinsame Ziele. Es wird eine fünftägige Zusammenkunft sein, die sich verworren und magisch zusammensetzt, die als eine Art soziale Choreografie funktioniert, innerhalb derer man sich trifft, austauscht, streitet und verändert. Ein dekonstruierter Rave und andere Formen des sozialen Beisammenseins und Tanzens sind da r essenziell. Der Rave müsste frühmorgens in der riesigen Halle in Hellerau beginnen. Er ist dann ein aufgeladener politischer Ort, wo die Konventionen des Nachtlebens keine Bedeutung haben. Ein Raum, in dem die Leute sich ganz unbefangen äußern können, weil es eine andere Art der Empfänglichkeit gibt. In dieser riesigen Höhle möchte ich etwas schaffen, das im Fluss ist, das die Gangart wechselt, so dass die Musik irgendwann langsamer wird, dann ganz abbricht, und ein anderer Raum zum Vorschein kommt, in dem man auf andere Weise präsent ist und sich zuhört.

HO: Der Tanzkongress ist auch eine Art utopisches Unterfangen. Es gab nicht viele Kongresse dieser Größenordnung – in der Weimarer Republik in den Jahren 1927, 1928 und 1930. Was wird es beim Tanzkongress für Rituale geben? MS: Ich interessiere mich gerade sehr für das Monte-Verità-Treffen in der Schweiz von 1917, bei dem Spiritisten, Anarchisten und Künstler auf diesem Berg zusammenkamen, um über alternative Lebensmodelle zu diskutieren. Beim ersten Tanzkongress 1927 wurde heftig über Dinge und Definitionen gestritten, die heute undenkbar sind, zum Beispiel was Tanz überhaupt ist, wie ein Tänzer zu sein hat oder welchen Nutzen der Tanz hat. Es ist auch immer wieder die Rede von der großen Party am Ende, bei der alle zusammenkamen. Da wäre ich gern dabei gewesen! Mich interessiert die gesellschaftliche Dimension von Tanz, Tanzgeschichte, heiligen Tänzen, kontemplativer Musik und Darstellungen, Kampfkunst. Mir ist wichtig, dass der Tanz nicht nur das Aufwärmen für den Diskurs-Teil ist, sondern dass beide in dasselbe Format integriert sind.

HO: Ich beschäftige mich gerade mit dem Phänomen der Tanzwut, auch Choreomanie oder Veitstanz genannt, das im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert in Europa auftrat. Ganz normale Leute in den Städten, nicht professionelle Tänzer, tanzten und tanzten, bis sie vor Erschöpfung umfielen. 1374 gab es so einen Ausbruch in Aachen. Wäre es nicht toll, wenn in Dresden die Tanzwut ausbräche?

MS: … oder eine Redewut! Wenn ich meinen Bewusstseinszustand ganz schnell ändere und meine Aufmerksamkeit auf etwas anderes außerhalb des gegenwärtigen Moments richte, habe ich das Gefühl, die Gesetze von Zeit und Raum außer Kraft zu setzen, mich durch andere Dimensionen zu bewegen. Ich glaube, es gibt eine Wahrheit, zu der man durch Körpertechniken gelangt. Tänzer wissen das, aber das sollte auch in anderen Bereichen verstanden werden: wie bestimmte Bewegungen unser Bewusstsein verändern. In Hellerau gibt es diesen großen Gartenbereich und ich hoffe, dass wir dort gemeinsame Rituale schaffen können, zum Beispiel um zusammen zu kochen und andere Formen des Austauschs zu erproben. Es wird sicher verschiedene Formen des Zusammenkommens und Feierns geben, aber auch des Zusammenkommens und Trauerns. Dresden wird keine fünftägige Party sein. Der Kongress wird eine Dramaturgie haben, in der Platz ist für die verschiedensten Dinge, für Meditation und Bewegung, aber auch für Gespräche über gewaltfreie Kommunikation zum Beispiel und Gerechtigkeit, oder über die Kraft der Gedanken.  

Meg Stuart, 1965 in New Orleans (USA) geboren, ist Tänzerin und eine weltweit bekannte Choreografin. 2018 erhielt sie den Goldenen Löwen der Biennale in Venedig für ihr Lebenswerk sowie den Deutschen Tanzpreis für herausragende Interpretinnen. Damit wurde ihre herausragende Rolle für die Entwicklung des zeitgenössischen Tanzes gewürdigt. Die Kulturstiftung des Bundes konnte Meg Stuart gewinnen, die künstlerische Leitung für den alle drei Jahre stattfindenden Tanzkongress, der 2019 in Dresden ausgerichtet wird, zu übernehmen. Meg Stuart lebt und arbeitet in Berlin und Brüssel.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, 1968 in Weinfelden (Schweiz) geboren, ist ein weltweit renommierter Kurator für zeitgenössische Kunst. Seit 2016 ist er Artistic Director der Serpentine Gallery in London. Obrist betreibt seit mehr als 15 Jahren sein „Interview Project“, eine umfangreiche Kollektion von Interviews mit Künstler*innen, Musiker*innen, Architekt*innen und Filmschaffenden.

“Post-Internet art comes from artists who see social media as their home and whose dependence on search engines has become irreversible, who use a Macbook as a studio and always have their smartphone within reach. (…) In this sense, we can also understand that there is an eternal back and forth movement between reality and virtuality.” Benoit Lamy de la Chapelle, “De l’art post-internet” The term “Danse Post-Internet” or Post-Internet-Dance is a new creation of (LA)HORDE, which refers to the term of the same name in the field of contemporary art. The term “Post-Internet” describes our practice very precisely. We create new gestures and choreographies, which are not bound to a certain time frame and are not only inspired by YouTube videos. “Post-Internet” in our case means that the body acts in both virtual and real spaces in different but comparable ways. From a dance point of view, this new space of self-expression has led many people to film themselves at home, dance and then share the videos in the social media, which is a very strong, courageous statement about the representation of oneself. Post-Internet art has also enabled us to gain access to very specific dances, such as traditional dances, tutorials, or dances born on the Internet, such as the jumpstyle we are currently focusing on. Jumpstyle is an electro dance style and musical genre that is now very popular in Eastern Europe as well as in some parts of Australia and the United States. Jumpstyling is often referred to as “jumping”: a combination of the English word “jump” and the Dutch and German suffix “-en”. Jumpstyle was created in 1997 in Belgium, but became very popular in the 2000s in its neighbouring country, the Netherlands. Jumpstyle is also a dance that you can discover on the Internet and which is usually practiced alone in your own room. It is very intensive and physically exhausting for the dancers*, a jumpstyle sequence lasts only about 25 seconds. The “jumpers” mobilize all their available energy to go through an improvisation sequence. The result is a very powerful style that goes directly against their own frustration. At the end of a solo, the “jumpers” are out of breath, but in a peaceful way, full of inner strength, calm, self-confidence and defiance. The “Jumpers” film their choreography and publish it on the Internet to share their passion, but also their progress, with their community. The steps that the “Jumpers* follow are usually the same: the first videos are shot directly in the youth rooms, then the living rooms or other larger areas follow, then they move into public space. Here you can easily see the development from private to public. This practice then spreads to social networks, where the community reacts with comments and adds its own videos. In online tournaments and virtual fights, leagues are formed, groups compete against each other and meet in different European cities. In working with the community and the dancers we always know that we are working with real processes and transforming them into (theatrical) fiction. It is ethically and politically very important for us to name this cultural appropriation when working with an existing community. The “Jumpers”, who choreograph and dance themselves, see us as analysts of their movement. They know that we respect them and work with them so that together we can write a new story – a fantasy world in which jumpstyle is the center. “TO DA BONE” is part of a long-term project that (LA)HORDE started some years ago with the hardcore scene. From these themes two productions have been created before. “TO DA BONE” was developed with “Jumpers*innen” from France, Canada, Hungary, Holland, Poland and the Ukraine. All participants were invited to several residencies in different countries in order to try out new inspirations and styles together outside the virtual space. The collective (LA)HORDE was founded in 2011 by the artists* Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer and Arthur Harel. (LA)HORDE is a multi-faceted creative collective that deals with staging, choreographic design, film production, video installation and performance. By exploring various artistic approaches, especially in the fields of live art and contemporary art, (LA)HORDE aims to create works that are creative and culturally relevant, regardless of the media platform.

On 17.01. the latest production “everyone” by John Moran (US/DE) celebrates its premiere in Dresden. In advance we asked the artist some questions about his work: What inspired you to “everyone”? I wanted to create one more work before I die, which – I hoped – would perfectly describe a style of music and theater I’ve spent my life devoted to. I say this with a sense of humor, as I think I could say the same for every piece I’ve written over the last 30 years. But I did create the work with this attitude. I would say that the work is a personal reflection on death, and at the same time, an overview of my musical/theatrical techniques. What we create in “everyone” are theatrical overviews of different lives, from birth to death, and the fight against gravity. These are presented as musical compositions, however. You write that “everyone” consists of precise sequences of gestures and movements performed by the performers in complete synchrony with previously recorded voices and sounds. What exactly can the audience imagine? The audience will first find their internal rhythms or their “rate of thought” being aligned to a shared tempo. This is something the audience doesn’t really notice as it is happening, and there are a lot of technical aspects which go into creating this effect, but many people describe it as a feeling of being “stoned”. After we are in that kind of hypnotic state, together, whatever we examine on the stage will then seem to have a greater sense of meaning. What is really happening, though, is that the techniques of the work recreate the sensation of personal memory. Creating this effect does require that performers move in tight synchronization to the soundtrack, as part of that illusion. And I think that audiences will find these dancers – Jule Oeft, Kristin Mente and Yamile Navarro – so talented at the performing the technique, they will often forget it is happening. From how much material on sound recordings was finally filtered out “everyone”? “everyone”, like all my works, is created out of thousands of short sound samples which are manipulated into sounding as if one, continuous recording. But generally, every footstep, word or even breath of a character being presented, is a separate recording. These are sounds I’ve cataloged over decades now, so when I need a character or situation to show a specific action, I can assemble that out of the right, individual sounds, instead of searching for a complete recording with those qualities. For example, when performers walk, I have thousands of different footsteps to choose from. After that I have many different kind of floors and surfaces which also make noise as a character moves. Doors, birds, cars of all different kinds, and in all kinds of distances from the microphone. I arrange these sounds on a keyboard, so that I can then learn to play them as musical phrases. So I’m describing realistic events, and making theater in that way, but I’m doing this as a composer. How do you translate everyday sounds into a musical partitur? At the beginning of my career in the 1980’s, I learned from composers like Steve Reich and his early tape-loop experiments, that all sounds have rhythm and pitch. A colleague of Reich’s, Phil Glass, was my mentor in New York, and he was also known for extended periods of repetition, although not with sound recordings but instrumental phrases. What I wanted to do, was to take those structural ideas, and apply them not only to a sound, or musical pattern, but to a virtual environment. And in these days, at the start of my career, personal computers did not exist. But I was striving for what I wanted to define as virtual reality, before that term had been invented. My stronger influence as a composer had been a childhood study of Disney animation, and a love for the rides at Disneyland. And so I spend my time organizing hundreds of individual sounds to define specific locations and situations which I imagine. And then put all those sounds into sequences on a tempo, so that the events I’m creating are both realistic in what they describe, theatrically, but also a musical composition. These are rhythms and melodies being presented, but they define realistic events. Since performers – who behave as mimes – learn these sound cues as a musical partiture and provide the missing visual of what the sounds describe, this becomes a form of dance, as well. So it is a form of music, theater and dance in which all these art forms are created as one expression. How did you come to Dresden as a New Yorker? And what has Dresden, what New York has to offer? The first time I came to Dresden was from Bangkok, where I used to keep a music-studio for in between touring. And the 2nd time I came to Dresden was from Glasgow, Scotland. People often call me a New Yorker, because the first 20 years of my career were there. But I left America in 2004 when I was offered an artist-in-residence program for the city of Paris. After two years there, I returned to New York again for a short time, but felt that capitalism had simply become something I didn’t enjoy, and found that in Europe and UK people understood what I was doing more. So I left America again, in order to start a nomadic life. I just wanted freedom from America. For the next 10 years I went from one country to another every month and lived and worked in hotels or whatever was offered to me as an artistic residence. So I traveled all over the world and had no security to fall back on at first – that was very exciting for some time. However, after 10 years of living like this, I was exhausted and decided to try out an experiment I had never done before and just stopped somewhere to see what would happen. I had met a group of people at Zentralwerk Dresden who I liked very much and had found some very close friends, like Heiko Oeft. Dresden was another kind of experiment that I enjoyed very much. I wanted artistic freedom and good friendships and I found these things in Dresden. When you mention New York today, I think only of commercialism.

Artists* collective and production house Komuna Warszawa

Komuna Warszawa is one of the most important free avant-garde theatres in Poland, experimenting between the boundaries of the performing arts, video and media arts, and music. In its works based on original texts, Komuna Warsza explores important contemporary themes, constantly searching for new forms and means of expression. Komuna Warszawa has been invited to some of the largest festivals in Poland and worldwide and has performed at venues such as La MaMa in New York City, Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin and 104 Centquatre in Paris. Komuna Warszawa is also a production house in which various art worlds meet: Komuna has produced projects by “mainstream theatre artists*” (Grzegorz Jarzyna, Monika Strzępka and Paweł Demirski, Michał Borczuch, Markus Öhrn) as well as sponsored young talents from the Polish dance and performance scene (Marta Ziółek, Paweł Sakowicz, Iza Szostak, Ania Nowak, Cezary To- maszewski and others). Komuna Warszawa cooperates with curators* from the performing arts and music. This results in extraordinary projects, each dedicated to a specific theme, e.g. “We, the Bourgeois”, “The Future” or the sequel series “Pre-war/War/Post-war” and “Musicals. Musicals”. One of the most important projects, which attracted critics’ praise and public interest alike, was the pioneering attempt at an “archaeology” of the performing arts, known as “RE//MIX”. Over a period of four years, productions were created that dealt with past masterpieces of the avant-garde of the performative arts. One of the highlights of the Warsaw theatre scene in the 2016-2017 season was a new format, the series “Mikro Teatr” (Micro Theatre). As part of Polski Transfer, there will be a presentation of a Polish-German variant of Mikro Teatr. How Komuna Otwock became Komuna// Warszawa: A conversation with Alina Gałązka (AG), Grzegorz Laszuk (GL) and Tomasz Plata (TP) Micro Theatre TP: […] And our last project, the Mikro Theater. All the invited artists* played on the same stage: Grzegorz Jarzyna, Radek Rychcik, Weronika Szczawińska, Anna Smolar and Romuald Krężel. They worked under the same conditions: Their productions were to last a maximum of sixteen minutes; they were only allowed to use props that fit into a suitcase the size of a carry-on bag, as well as two microphones, four spotlights and a projector. The entire cycle consisted of eighteen productions plus others in Lublin and Poznań – on franchise stages [laughter]. Micro theatre was about different things. First, it was about making the production conditions visible at the theater. This gave the audience a clear impression of how theatre is created. It recognised the institutional conditions that determine what can be shown on stage. Secondly, it was about a concrete reflection on Polish theatre and, in this context, about a precise analysis. If you only have sixteen minutes, you have to be direct, without adornments, you have to clearly define what you have to say. I like such theatre very much: simple, conceptual. Theatre, so to speak, with a small dose of theatre. And thirdly, micro theatre was a special exercise for a guerilla theatre, something was created here with limited means and free from political pressure from different directions. As we know, contemporary Polish theatre must develop a strategy of resistance to political pressure, and quickly. And the micro theatre format can teach us a lot about how this works. There was some criticism that said that our project was the realization of a neo-liberal dream: fast production, fast consumption, low costs, precarious working conditions, the system satisfied because it didn’t have to invest much, and the audience satisfied because it saw three performances in one evening. In my opinion, the Mikro Theater project has revealed these institutional entanglements rather than tacitly accepting them. Where is Komuna now? AG: We are in a difficult situation at the moment. Komuna Warszawa has become a large organisation and we can no longer maintain it without somehow paying full-time employees. Financial issues are very difficult for NGOs and without institutional support it is easy to make mistakes. They need to know that the curator is working for us for nothing, or at least almost for nothing, and the administrative staff are not paid for their work either. Some Komuna members also work for free. For the artists*who come from outside, we usually pay a small amount. Because of these conditions, we now need time to reconsider our approach. GL: Alina is right: we lack institutional anchoring. Many important theatre people work with us (…) and many others, old and young, trust us and want to work with us. If we do not find a reliable source of financing, our concept will not work. It is an imperative of dignity to offer artists good working conditions. AG: For some time now we have been thinking about a new model, which I would like to outline briefly. A non-public cultural institution is defined by the fact of its permanence: it has a permanent repertoire team of regular employees* and a recognizable profile. Not public here means that the cultural institution does not receive regular grants and is not administered by state or local authorities. It applies for funding in a competition by submitting a programme concept. In this competition, the city or the ministry can select several non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that are recognised as “figureheads”, stable and with a secure repertoire. In such a situation, competitions should only be tailored to this form of cultural institution (NGO). And interestingly, this is possible under Polish law. But there is another alternative: one non-governmental organisation is run by another. The law on cultural activities allows this. They open a tender procedure or enter into a direct agreement. In this way it can work. Together with Aldona Machnowska-Góra [an NGO activist], we have tried to arouse the interest of female politicians for this topic, but unfortunately without success. In such independent cultural institutions it is possible to develop the programme as a group, as a team. This is how it works at Komuna: decisions are usually made together. Grzegorz has one idea, Tomasz has another, someone else has another, then we talk about everything and in the end we take care of the money. We want to develop our projects autonomously and not adapt at any price to the desired issues of the donors. GL: We have certain tastes, we are an experimental theatre. Nevertheless, our performances are usually sold out. It’s good that the mature audience is growing. TP: Komuna Warszawa is a unique cultural organization in Poland. The group has developed its own productions for thirty years, maintains a permanent venue and has also become a production site. Given the size of this city (Warsaw), this is quite an achievement. Komuna has also become a point of reference for other institutions, especially since many directors and actors are leaving the official institutional cycle because of the politics of the Law and Justice Party. Suddenly they have to look for new forms of artistic work. Here the story of Komuna Warszawa can be helpful. Excerpt from Polish Theatre Journal 2017: Arkadiusz Gruszczyński (Ed.)

Arrested: WE

On the occasion of the Warsaw premiere of “The Trial” (Franz Kafka) in November 2017, the dramaturge of the Nowy Teatr Warsaw Piotr Gruszczyński had a conversation with the director Krystian Lupa. The interview is printed here in abbreviated form. Why did you decide to stage the “trial” of Franz Kafka and not “America”? “The Process” came as an answer to reality, because our reality constantly allows the same motifs to sound. This kind of strange, dark attack on man with the help of the court, the indictment, elimination and violation with the help of the law, as well as this astonishing, demagogic discourse that the rulers – but not only the rulers – use today in the settlements between the government and the individual, all this constantly reminds us of Kafka’s pattern, of irrationality and of the feeling of panic, as well as of the futility of defense and the loss of the feeling of reality that we have been given. All these are components of Kafka’s, perhaps appearing here in a different constellation, in a different cocktail, but basically the same. The moment we look at these components separately, they can become an instrument for the theatregoer to understand today’s reality. And vice versa, perhaps today’s reality gives a different key to understanding Kafka. This works in both directions. It’s interesting to note that in Poland it’s only now that people are beginning to realize how much legislation creates reality. In the play “Angels in America” there is the sentence Roy Cohn says that it was the lawyers who built America. It used to seem strange to me because it seemed so far away, but at the moment we are experiencing for ourselves how legislation can work. Yes, and that is very dangerous, because it contains many traps, almost Egyptian traps, into which we fall. It can also be said that the lawyers are cheating democracy. Democracy is proving to be a construction with too weak a legal basis, which can be deformed at will. And then there is a hybrid structure, a monster, which is reminiscent of a democratic structure, where justice, human development and all the positive things that make up the state as a human crowd are supposedly still at stake, a common culture that advances and sets new goals for new generations. All these things can in some way be outwitted and forced in the name of the law, and man is deceived. In search of a competent man, Kafka dives into court, where he finally meets the lawyer Masala. It is an odyssey in the search for salvation in which man sinks further and further and comes to destruction, basically self-destruction through all these rescue movements. In his search for competent people who could help him, he comes up against the perversion and absurdity of the legal systems and structures. Finally, he arrives at the initiates, who prove to be insane and in these machinations have forgotten the principle of being human, all the positive things that exist in relations between man and man, in social relations. We must not forget that behind Kafka’s trial there is a mysterious entity: it is not an official state. Kafka says that it is not an official court. In the state, an invisible structure emerges that arrogates things, builds structures that creep parasitically into what is found…until it finally grows through the whole organism… Like a proliferation, like a state dominated by the mafia. An organism that is eaten by the mushroom. Yes, this path in the search for competent people is symptomatic and says a lot. We could follow Joseph K.’s path through this mysterious structure today. We know who governs us, who our government is, but de facto we know less and less. What we see from the outside, with our government headed by Kaczynski, is beginning to have less and less significance. It seems that we have fallen into a strange trap with them all. They will try to save their existence, because for them it is about either – or. At that moment we don’t know into which room of the Minotaur our ship will be thrown. In communist Poland, “The Trial” was often staged because it was ideally suited to the totalitarian vision of the state. What does this mean to you? Does that mean that we have returned to something? Or perhaps that view of Kafka was simplistic? At that time they tried to build allusions. I am also afraid that this work has such a good effect on our intuitions that it immediately spurs us on to certain associations and is very contagious. This leads to superficial allusions. For this reason we have tried to take away the Austrian-Hungarian aftertaste of the work. A year ago, when we started rehearsals in Breslau, we were also interested in the Jewish trail; at the moment it is not in the foreground because it would have fascinated us too much and we could have drowned in it. Above all, we try to tell the story of a person as if “The Trial” had been written today. It wasn’t about making risky updates, but rather about highlighting the roughest anachronisms. Suddenly it turned out that it was enough to remove this typical taste of the 19th century. This tale of attack, defence and guilt is absolutely contemporary, without any allusions. It itself contains enough thoughts that are of enormous importance at the moment and sound very strong. We have tried to follow another trail and have been interested that Kafka did not complete the novel. We speak of guilt, there is a trial, a court, of the accused or arrested Josef K. What is his guilt for you? Kafka seems to me to be as fascinating as he is suspicious, incredibly secretive, he was too hurt and deported from the world, too lonely to be a normal person. That’s what everyone says: no innocent person behaves like that. Kafka himself has a strangely sadistic and hateful relationship with his protagonist, we can even say that Kafka kills his hero in a vengeful way. It’s a kind of demonstrative suicide act, which is very complex, that’s why psychiatrists love to ride Kafka as a sick person. The morbidity of Kafka’s personality cannot be overestimated. Kafka is an example of our social cultural disease. He is not a sage who stands above society, or someone who presumes to be a sage. Kafka says something different: everyone is guilty, there are no innocent people, innocent people were invented by the law, everyone is corrupt and condemned to lie in the face of the law, innocence is pure imagination. Look how that has changed; for a long time this novel had been read in such a way that Josef K. was innocent, a victim of the system, the machinery. The book was not written as the story of an innocent man, that is the story of a man who has a hidden guilt. We participate in this novel like in a dream in which we are persecuted, but this protagonist is neither sympathetic nor understandable. He is morbidly egocentric, does not settle consciences, he is a strangely dishonest person who only follows the trail of his salvation, he is drawn into a machinery of lies. The process itself does not strive for truth, but for the extinction and destruction of the individual. I understand that in such a way that Josef K. r is not an empathic hero for you? He is not a role model at all. Josef K. only defends his life, you cannot make a hero of him. But if he already remains such a man, crippled and asocial, whose ambitions are exclusively egoistic, who has no dreams connected with the world and no mission to give the world anything – there are no traces of it – then in the moment he is attacked he lets go of many observations, sentences not spoken at the end in the moment of reflection, a desperate struggle, complete dazedness by this process that lasts too long – these words are accurate for us. We do not need to identify ourselves with the protagonist, we do not need to show him as an example, he should remain an unfinished human being. Because of this imperfection and his lack of courage, his lack of consistency, he is killed. Kafka kills the wretched man in himself. I thought it would be difficult for me to identify with this hero, but unfortunately or fortunately it is unavoidable. When we begin to stage Kafka, I immerse myself in this person with all his ailments and find myself in him. This is as frightening as it is fascinating, we all experience it when we try to go deeper, a kind of self-abasement. This vampire-like author demands very strange experiences from the actor, who tries to understand him courageously, not superficially, to the last. Translation from Polish by Agnieszka Grzybkowska

4:3 kann auf einer Fussballanzeigetafel stehen, 4:3 steht aber auch für das Frequenzverhältnis der reinen Quarte, es kann Spannungs-, rhythmische und Mehrheitsverhältnisse benennen, kann Raumdimensionen und Musikerformationen beschreiben — 4:3 stellt immer die Frage nach der Konstellation. Spätestens seit Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts hat sich vor allem das Streichquartett als „Königsklasse“ der Kammermusik etabliert. Luigi Nono wiederum hatte sich viele Jahre dieser Gattung verweigert, erst 1980 wurde sein Streichquartett „Fragmente – Stille. An Diotima“ uraufgeführt. Vielleicht war Nono – als betont politischer Komponist – lange skeptisch gegenüber einer musikalischen Gattung, die zu seiner Zeit eher mit konservativen und weniger avantgardistischen oder sozial engagierten und kritischen Haltungen in Verbindung zu bringen war? Dass Nono sich letztlich doch für diese Komposition entschied, bezeichnete er als Ausdruck eines „gegenwärtigen Experimentierstandes“, entdeckt hatte er für sich eine kollektive und politische Seite des Zarten und Privaten, die Möglichkeit zur großen aufrührerischen Aussage mit kleinsten Mitteln. Es ist sicherlich richtig, die Anfänge europäischer Kammermusik in der Spätrenaissance zu sehen. Dieser vor allem aus kompositorischer oder musikhistorischer Sicht interessante Ansatz vernachlässigt aber oft eine eher musiksoziologische Perspektive, die Kammermusik auch in der Tradition musikalischer Versammlungskulturen, musikpraktischer Netzwerke und Hör- gemeinscha en beschreiben kann. Hinsichtlich europäischer Traditionen erscheint deshalb z.B. der Beginn der Entwicklung europäischer bürgerlicher Gesellschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhun- derts als interessanter Bezugspunkt, könnte man doch hier kammermusikalische neben literarischen Salons als prägend und essenziell für diese Entwicklung benennen und damit klarer ein gesellschaftlich relevantes Potenzial beleuchten. Auch heute ist musikalische Versammlungskultur stark in unserem Alltag verankert, allerdings sind gerade im Bereich der sogenannten ernsten oder klassischen Musik – im Gegensatz z.B. zu Entwicklungen in Jazz, Rock, Electro- nic oder Punk – die benannten gemeinschaftsbildenden Ursprünge musikalischer Salon- und Kammermusikkultur, vor allem aber die von Nono betonten Aspekte des Kollektiven und Politischen, verblasst. 4:3 wird als neues Format in HELLERAU Kammermusik in den Mittelpunkt stellen und dabei ganz bewusst auch kol- lektive und politische Seiten des Zarten und Privaten und die Möglichkeiten zur großen aufrührerischen Aussage mit kleinsten Mitteln untersuchen, will die Rolle der Künstler*innen wie auch des Publikums thematisieren, will Spannungs- wie Raumverhältnisse austesten und Mehrheiten wie Minderheiten zu Wort kommen lassen. 4:3 wird vor allem aktuelle Kompositionen und jüngere Ensembles präsentieren und – gemeinsam auch mit dem Publikum – Plattform für Experimente und die Entwicklung von communities of practice (Jean Lave/Etienne Wenger, 1991) sein. 4:3 wird langfristiger Partner des künstlerischen Nachwuchses sein; 2018 wird die Komponistenklasse Dresden in Kooperation mit dem Bozzini Quartett Uraufführungen präsentieren, Absolvent*innen der Internationalen Ensemble Modern Akademie werden u.a. „Hölderlin Lesen“ von Hans Zender aufführen. Als zwei der spannendsten jüngeren Vertreter*innen neuer musikalischer Kollektive sind 2018 Ensemble Adapter und Ensemble Decoder bei 4:3 zu Gast. Adapter ist ein deutsch-isländisches Ensemble für Neue Musik mit Sitz in Berlin. Den Kern der Gruppe bildet ein Quartett aus Flöte, Klarinette, Harfe und Schlagzeug. Mit progressivem und kraftvollem Stil widmen sich die Musiker*innen in Konzerten und im Studio einem individuellen und internationalen Repertoire zeitgenössischer Musik, hinterfragen in experimentellen Settings den Begriff des Kammermusikalischen. Erworbenes Wissen über Komposition, Studium und Aufführung von zeitgenössischer Musik teilen sie weltweit mit Komponist*innen, Instrumentalist*innen und anderen Kreativen. Ensemble Decoder, gegründet 2011 in Hamburg, versteht sich als „Band für aktuelle Musik“ und zählt zu den innova- tivsten und unberechenbarsten Vertreter*innen der internationalen Neue-Musik-Szene. Die Formation, bestehend aus elektronischen und akustischen Instrumenten, zeichnet sich durch einen besonders charakteristischen energetischen Sound aus, hebt sich dadurch deutlich vom Klangbild konventioneller Kammermusikgruppen ab und bricht spielerisch und mit großer Ernsthaftigkeit scheinbar selbstverständliche Rollenverständnisse zwischen Publikum und musikalischen Akteur*innen auf. Zentral ist für Decoder die Zusammenarbeit mit Komponist*innen der jüngeren Generation – wie z.B. mit Brigitta Muntendorf, die das Konzertprogramm von Decoder für HELLERAU kuratieren wird. Moritz Lobeck Programmleitung Musik und Medien  

“ZWEI für Dresden – Initiative zur Stärkung der Freien Darstellenden Künste in Dresden” is a position paper presented in 2017 by the Coalition of Independent Performing Arts Dresden (KFDK) based on a submission by the artist groups Cie. FREAKS UND FREMDE, the guts company, Katja Erfurth, JuWie Dance Company, shot AG, Theater La Lune, theatrale subversion. Among the signatories to the paper are 33 Dresden artists from various disciplines, including Johanna Roggan (JR) and Anna Till (AT). André Schallenberg, Programme Director Theatre and Dance in HELLERAU, spoke with them. What does the term free scene mean and what does it mean to you personally? AT: The term free scene is very blurred. Basically, free scene means that artists* are freelance and independent of theatres, i.e. without a fixed ensemble structure. Since many choreographers* produce their plays in co-productions with several partners (including theatres, festivals and other venues), the boundaries are also blurred. For me, free scene means having a lot of room for experimentation and new forms of artistic expression. As a choreographer, I alone decide on the theme for my new piece and put together the artistic team myself. I am responsible for the smooth running of these procedures. However, the free scene also means that I operate with a less well developed infrastructure than at a state or city theatre. Besides the artistic work, I have to make sure that all administrative steps work. This means that I have to set up my own infrastructure within my company, employ people for fundraising, press and public relations, production management, accounting and much more. I also have to be able to rent rehearsal rooms and pay for stage and costume equipment. All employees* of my company are paid by me and I am responsible for the smooth running of these processes. So as a choreographer I run my own company. JR: For me personally, the term means that I can do my own work at my own pace and with the people I choose. I don’t have to use a game plan. So I can devote myself to topics that are burning on my soul. For me, this also means not being a recipient of instructions and not being bound to an immediate hierarchy. Which, in view of the institutions with which I work, is only half right. We need the institutions (be it the theatres or the funding institutions) and they need us. You helped to develop the coalition paper for the independent scene in Dresden. Who wrote it and what is your main concern? JR: It all began with seven independent dance and theatre groups and individual artists who are closely connected to the Societaetstheater. So it was also clear that we could only speak for the performing arts at first, not for the entire independent scene. Whereby it would be good if other sections also worked out such papers and we would then join forces. Our basic concern is to increase and restructure the support measures for independent projects/groups. At the moment there is not only disproportionately little money in the funding pot, you can also apply each time only for a single project. There is no continuous funding possibility such as, for example, concept funding over several years. However, a more flexible funding landscape would be the right answer in view of the working realities of freelance artists. The Landesverband Freie Theater Sachsen, like the Bundesverband Freie Darstellende Künste, has calculated a lower fee limit with which artists* must at least be paid. If these were applied here, the city of Dresden could perhaps support two projects a year. Neither a state capital nor a city can afford this on its way to becoming the European Capital of Culture. So there is room for improvement here. Our analysis is very detailed and precise in its description of the situation, the needs and possible solutions. I would say that we or our colleagues have done a great deal of work – and done it on a voluntary basis. That must not be forgotten! Are there similar initiatives in other cities? JR: Yes. Fortunately! We copied a lot from Berlin (Coalition of the Free Scene Berlin). But also Frankfurt am Main now has a kind of coalition and in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania they also sat down together. Years ago Leipzig had already brought the various actors* together at one table and published the demand “5 for Leipzig”. Wherever you look, it is above all the artists* who get together and raise a common voice. The grievances that become clear are so great on a financial level that one often doesn’t even dare to say how much money is really needed to pay for our work fairly. By the way, road construction, for example, is also subsidized. So art is not the only sector that receives public money. How do these working conditions influence your work? AT: I would say that the working conditions influence our artistic work enormously. That’s why the most important questions at the beginning of a production are: Which venue would I like to cooperate with? Which venue fits my next theme and can I realize my visions there? Then come the questions about financing and sponsors. If the piece is, for example, a cooperation with dancers*from Mozambique, I can apply for funding from other institutions than if it is a production with a team of exclusively Dresden* women. If it’s an interdisciplinary work that strongly involves photography or video, there will be another fund, etc. Step by step you then approach your artistic goal via a sometimes very complex network of cooperations, which of course always determine the working method and in this sense also the end product. But you enter into this deal right from the start and are aware of it. How do you wish for a future, how should the dance scene – or the world – look like in 20 years? AT: In 20 years I would like to see a Dresden dance scene that is widely networked and active beyond Europe’s borders. Dance is taught in schools as an independent art form and is also understood independently of theatres and ballet companies. In 20 years it will be nothing special that people with disabilities will study dance and work as dance creators, so that you no longer have to start inclusive projects, but dance artists* will generally be better supported (meaning: sufficiently). In 20 years, the audience will be interested in dance with a high entertainment value as well as in special experiments and unusual projects. Politicians* have come to the conclusion that the coexistence of institutional culture and the independent scene is necessary and that all artists* deserve the same recognition. JR: The world in 20 years, so when my son is 20, he should not have to explain what his mother’s job is and what she does during the day. Art, and also dance, should then be firmly anchored in people’s understanding of the world. That it has a value that is difficult to quantify with money. A value that works into the soul, that satisfies, illuminates, lifts, animates, moves, in short: keeps us alive. Can art move? JR: With a crane I can move (almost) everything. Sometimes I imagine art as a crane. With heavy weights so as not to tip over, it rises enormously into the air. The crane can turn and sway in the wind and lift and move things. You can see the crane from afar, but not always why it is standing there. You can’t see anything for a long time, but at some point the house or the bridge is finished and at the end nobody knows what it looked like before or how life worked before without the buildings. The crane operator sits right at the top. He has a great view, but also enough distance not to get confused. He simply does his job. He should only be free of vertigo. Yes, art can move. The work moves. The artist is “only” the one who makes the work visible, audible, perceptible, experiencable. The artist does his work. Art then moves in the best case. And that always depends very much on the personal background of the viewer. And the willingness to take risks, to be moved by art. AT: When I’m honest, sometimes I ask myself that. I think it’s extremely important how art is perceived, how it’s presented. Is it consumed as one product among many or do I have the time to let a work of art affect me? Time-based art (i.e. film, theatre, dance, performance, music, etc.) is the ideal medium for me to get really close to the audience. The audience*gives me their time and I have to use it to make a special aesthetic experience possible. After that it is no longer in my hands how, if and whom my work has moved. What I am sure of is that during the moment of the performance I set something in motion in my counterpart. In a live performance, performers* enter into a direct relationship with the audience, they share a place and the same time. It’s so simple, but it fascinates me again and again. Nobody can escape the events on stage.  This moment is the only chance to make a difference. What are your personal intentions, what moves you most at the moment, from an artistic point of view? JR: When I look at my works, in retrospect I see a red thread that runs through them. Somehow it’s always about social questions, situations, images … Will or can I live as I do at the moment? How does it live with limitations, how does one live with strangers, what constitutes home, can I influence my environment and how does it influence me? How am I connected with my environment? This is a kind of bottomless pit, because with each work new questions arise that lead to new ones. At the moment I am driven by the topic of power. Power structures, mass as power and powerlessness, power of the individual, power of images, power of sound/music, power and gender, language and power – a huge complex of themes! We (the guts company) are just at the beginning and I am very curious where the journey will take me. In any case the work with language and choir will continue. I would also like to have a wacky, moving stage set again. But that costs … Dance has a value that works in the soul, that satisfies us, brightens us, lifts us up, enlivens us, moves us, in short: keeps us alive. AT: I’m busy with numbers, space and time right now. Big themes, but more precisely, each individual project asks for the gap between personal experience and the attempt to express it in numbers, measurements or words. In the project “KARUSSELL”, which we are just planning within our company situation productions, we want to create a performance space together with a larger group of artists* from different genres, which enables a new experience of time. “Life in numbers”, a cooperation with a choreographer from Maputo, plays with the (in)sense of comparative statistics between Germany and Mozambique. “Lost in creation” deals with the universe as an endless projection surface and space for scientific conquest. I am impressed by the fact that intangible quantities such as the distance between the Earth and the Sun are determined by scientists* and galaxies are explored that none of us will ever enter, while on Earth we don’t even know our neighbour. This longing for the unknown occupies me, simply because I can bend and define it and do not have to enter into a dialogue with it. This is how we name, analyze and categorize one planet after another. For me, the obsession with making other planets habitable stands in stark contrast to our laziness with regard to everyday (international) understanding.

Dimitris Papaioannou tames the crisis with absurd circus, torn bodies and contemporary mythology. The festivals of this world have been waiting for someone like him for a long time. Dimitris Papaioannou rises like Phoenix. Not from the ashes, but from Greece, the supposed no man’s land of the contemporary stage. The founder of the Edafos Dance Theatre and great stage director of the Olympic ceremonies in Athens in 2004 is a visual philosopher who, as an existentialist, deals with the fundamental questions of life, existence and humanity. The surrealist sketches images that confuse our senses in absolute conciseness and with which he creates as many “aha” experiences in a single piece as other choreographers in a decade. One who dissects things – and the bodies – in order to recompile them like Picasso, and turns them upside down simply because it’s more honest. The imagination of the illusion artist Papaioannou seems to have no limits. He can make arms, legs and trunk jump separately from the stage or create a person when several actors each contribute arm, leg or trunk. This heralds a complete oeuvre, a handwriting as authentic and personal as it is surprising and yet immediately understandable, since it confronts the origins of European philosophy with today’s attitude to life. Papaioannou combines the truthfulness and widescreen format of Pina Bausch with Josef Nadj’s never-ending exploration of the absurd. In “The Great Tamer”, they are joined by an invisible machinery for special effects from the underground and perspective shifts that open the view to the abysses of the subconscious. Papaioannou draws many of his ideas directly from the roots of his own culture and from his studies in contemporary dance and Butoh. Show skating for the sky Papaioannou has been doing theatre since 1986. There he studied at the Art Academy of Athens and also frequented squatter circles. His first collective was founded in a squat near the academy. “But it’s a misunderstanding that I would have lived there too. In the meantime I was a squatter, but in a different place. It’s true that my artistic roots lie in the no-budget culture. With our bare hands we built the ground floor into a small theatre. We didn’t care about money, we just wanted to do our thing. But little by little, we also appeared in more official theatres and at some point we even received subsidies.” Edafos Dance Theater was the name of the troupe, named after Earth. There are also material reasons why he wasn’t seen outside his homeland before. “Previously, my productions and stage designs were simply too elaborate to go on tour.” Drawing instead of writing Of course, he aroused curiosity when he staged the opening ceremony and closing ceremony of the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004. But he dissolved his company Edafos and disappeared from the scene for years to devote himself solely to the ceremonies with their eight thousand performers. Their choreographies had nothing in common with his own stage work, because Papaioannou doesn’t like mass scenes. For them he engaged other choreographers. He himself was responsible for the overall concept, and that was perfectly in keeping with his way of working. His concepts emerge on a purely visual level. Instead of written notes, he constantly makes drawings. From the improvisations with the actors*, which he selects according to gut feeling, he creates new sketches, which he implements on stage and slowly joins together to form a large whole. At the earliest one month before the premiere, he was in a position to make statements about the content, theme, title or duration of a new piece, he explained. Just like here: “The Great Tamer is not an ancient hero or a new Great Dictator . la Chaplin, but man as such, in the storm of his own energies and instincts. The crux of the Olympics His beginnings as an artist lie in drawing, and to this day he paints and photographs alongside his stage work. However, the atmosphere in Athens in the 1980s was particularly free. Papaioannou illustrated magazines of the gay scene. And today? He doesn’t reveal everything. “What I show people is only part of my creativity. The visual composition is vital for me to survive.” But his representation of the male body on stage is extremely sensitive and characterized by ancient sculpture and Renaissance painting. There are many deities in play and motifs from Rembrandt to Botticelli, from El Greco to Magritte. He dedicated the Olympic opening ceremony of 2004 to Apollo, the closing ceremony of Dionysus. His work today draws striking inspiration from the research on this mega-work, despite critical reflections on its backgrounds. “Of course, I was very lucky to be able to sum up what my country means to me in this way. It was like a liberation. “Olympia, that was the moment from which things started to go downhill with Hellas, with his finance and his economic performance, followed by a clear cut in the cultural budget? “The games seemed like the trigger for the crisis, but the roots lie much deeper, in corruption and the poor functioning of politics and state organisation. Greece had to borrow more and more money. Finally a chain reaction took place. Olympia was a last illusionary effect and a great egobooster for the country. But it is a ridiculous idea that a small country could organize such expensive games. Let’s put the spotlight back on sport at the Olympics”. With this in mind, Papaioannou wanted to consciously set an example with his technically simpler stage designs in the face of the crisis. Absurd Circus The stage set of “The Great Tamer” is a grey-black moon desert made of rigid wooden and flexible rubber plates. Eleven people cross on and below them, whose bodies seem to be made of steel and rubber at the same time. One of them looks like his alter ego, a kind of leading figure who remains motionless in the prologue, like a statue, and has the audience in his sights. Then the man takes off his clothes in peace and turns over a dark plate that now serves as a beach towel. But the sunbathing becomes a funeral, under a shroud, so light that the breeze of a falling plate blows it away effortlessly. They play through the scene again and again, like in a ritual, like a picture that traumatically follows you. This motif and many others recur throughout the piece: two men lying on top of each other dancing a horizontal waltz to Johann Strauss. Later, the piece plays with our fear that holes in the ground could swallow those who run away. Papaioannou calls his pieces, in all their tragic reach, absurd circus or the dream of it. The starting point of the fantasies and nightmares in “The Great Tamer” was the suicide of a teenager. Pursued by his (Facebook?) friends*, he dug himself into the earth. The paradoxical, disturbing and surreal compositions are like distorting mirrors of this trauma. They may also, just as in “Still Life,” contain a metaphor of the current situation in Greece. But that only pleases him to a limited extent: “The so-called political art is reduced art. I don’t like that. But it’s inevitable that art related to its time will also work on the political level. There is a It is inevitable that these questions will affect my country in terms of its present and its history. These are not comments, but a reflection of the atmosphere in which we have lived in recent years.”

“What a start! Touching theatre with content, recollection and full topicality. A German premiere, which was certainly not brought to HELLERAU for this reason, not as an end in itself. The new artistic director Carena Schlewitt proved her courage and attitude by inviting the production “War and Turpentine” by Jan Lauwers and the Belgian Needcompany to Dresden.” The DNN drew this result after our opening of the 2018/2019 season on 14.09.2018. The evening was also framed by opening speeches by the artistic director Carena Schlewitt, the cultural mayor Annekatrin Klepsch (Die Linke) and the art minister Eva-Maria Stange (SPD). All speeches have one thing in common: The aim is to preserve the freedom of art and to promote coexistence among all people from a HELLERAU reputation. Now you can read the opening speech of the artistic director Carena Schlewitt here: Dear guests of the evening, HELLERAU – the European Centre of the Arts and also the Festspielhaus Hellerau would not exist without the arts and without the visionaries who promoted, supported and also accompanied the arts. HELLERAU is a house for artists. And I can tell you that last Sunday we, the HELLERAU team, were already very happy, almost exhilarated, to have many Dresden artists in our house on the day of the open monument to our Spielzeitfest. Artistic work is a hard profession, a permanent process of search, a process marked by success and failure, a process of collective work as well as loneliness. And: With the decision to work professionally in art, artists consciously take risks in their private lives. It is important for me to express my appreciation of art, its processes and its makers as an introduction to my new task. Now art, especially in the performative arts – dance, theatre, music, performance – is bound to include the audience. With our season programme, we will only be getting to know the Dresden audience in the coming weeks and months. Based on my experience to date, I am convinced that the breadth and versatility of contemporary art can attract and inspire an equally broad audience. By this I also mean very different formats in the encounter between artist*in and visitor*in. An open house without a grandstand, flooded with light from the Portikus, through the festival hall to the garden, and a performance throughout the house, as on the day of the open monument, perhaps attracts other visitors than a choreography, a concert, a staging that addresses an audience frontally in a closed room, or as a performative walk with an artist collective through the garden city of Hellerau. This diversity, these forms bring contemporary art with them and involve the audience in ever new situations, experiencing art not only as art, but also in different social constellations. Every audience situation can also involve risks – encounters cannot work out or even take place in the first place. But they can also trigger a lot emotionally, socially and culturally. I think that the encounter with the audience must be more than the question of the number of visitors – however much I like to have full halls, a full house. We won’t be able to get to know every visitor, but we would like to get into conversation with each other. And a culture of conversation about art is always also a culture of conversation about society. Now I have described HELLERAU as a house of artists and audiences. But the house also stands as a cultural institution in today’s society and is part of that society – in Dresden, in Saxony, in Germany and in the world. Even if this may sound a little full-bodied, we are networked and connected with many partners at home and abroad. In recent weeks and months I have had many conversations with Dresden actors, partners and institutions and I have great hopes that together we will not only set one but many signs for a pluralistic, diverse society, for a life in peace and for social coexistence. It is very alarming that these self-evident aspects of human coexistence still have to be repeated every day and increasingly so – not only here in Germany, but in many countries and cities. We should celebrate life and art with many people, and that too is a political sign, a sign against exclusion and hatred. At this point I would like to say a few words about today’s play of the evening “War and Turpentine” or “My Grandfather’s Heaven”, as the title of the first German translation of the book is called. Stefan Hertmans wrote this novel as a tribute to his grandfather. The story runs in parts parallel to the project to build the Festspielhaus HELLERAU: Here the vision and the leap into modernity, there the human struggle with industrialisation and above all the confrontation with the First World War. But with all the difficult experiences and experiences, there is always the existential longing for art. It is this perspective that impressed me so much in the congenial realization of the Needcompany with the great narrator/actress Viviane De Muynck. With this in mind, I wish you a stimulating evening. Last but not least, I would like to thank the supporters of HELLERAU – European Centre of the Arts, first and foremost the City of Dresden. It’s a great stroke of luck that the city of Dresden supports and promotes a house like HELLERAU. I would also like to thank the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media, who supports HELLERAU within the framework of the Alliance of International Production Houses. And we are extremely pleased about the support of many partners and foundations this season, of which I can only name a few here: the Federal Agency for Political Education, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony, the Free State of Saxony, the National Performance Network, the Dresden Foundation for Art and Culture of the Ostsächsische Sparkasse Dresden, the Foundation for Art and Music for Dresden, the Förderverein Hellerau e.V. and many more. And everything that takes place in HELLERAU and has to do with HELLERAU would not be possible without the great commitment of all employees who approach the challenging tasks with commitment and a good atmosphere day after day. For this I would like to express my sincere thanks!