How I managed to get an audience for an independent experimental music-theatre piece and enjoyed applying creative entrepreneurial strategies to a publicly funded art project. I hope this report to be inspiring and motivating to fellow theatre makers. An adventure report.
Klaus Mann outlined in his novel the timeless dancing on the volcano and the fall of the glamorous. A panorama of his contemporaries, the artists and intellectuals, children of the gods of the Golden Twenties, who did not want to give up their ecstasy even when swastikas were already flying over Babylon. But above all, the text is a portrait of a famous actor: Gustaf Gründgens. Staging by Thomas Jonigk at the Staatstheater Kassel.
Starting from an omnipresent end-time mood, Emre Akal and his team ask for this: "What is it that you are looking for? What comes after the imaginable future, after the collapse of liberal democracy and old Europe as we knew it? In a formally abstract world of images, they let the future rub against the past - always remembering: What are we leaving behind as society today, the people of the future, and will we have learned from our mistakes? What remains of... us?
As a student I had made it my habit not to turn off the music when I left the apartment but the album I was listening to had not yet come to an end. To me it seemed disrespectful towards the music to just turn it off. What was brought into oscillation should be allowed to finish. On the creation of "Small Places", a sound installation for ECM Records‘ 50th anniversary as part of the RE:ECM exhibition at Storage by Hyundai Card in Seoul, Korea, 2019.
"Sometimes I ask myself how they can do that: to hate so much. How they can be so sure. Because that's what the haters must be: safe. Otherwise they wouldn't speak like that, hurt like that, murder like that. They must be sure. Without any doubt. Doubtful of hate cannot be hated." On the basis of concrete incidents, Emcke examines institutional racism, group-related misanthropy and disregard and finally pleads for a heterogeneous society and humanism.
Romantisation and dissection of our reality: "...at the same time we are made aware of the fact that we all too often do not want to see the other side of prosperity, poverty, loneliness, social inequality, especially in Munich, we surround ourselves with bulletproof glass 'in order not to break', as a passer-by remarked."
The pedestrian zone in front of the Kunsthalle Munich: There, a homeless person appears in the midst of lustfully shopping, well dressed people. In the hopelessness of her existence, she transfigures everything ordinary into art. Sounds from her memory fit into an orchestration of the urban sound space. Everything she hears becomes a global song in which, like Wagner's Isolde, she finds redemption through death and resurrection in love.
under construction…
Where is the music coming from?
The change from linearity to non-linearity associated with digitalization is accompanied by a change in the perception of art and culture. We now have the chance to shape our co-existence with the algorithms, not only socially and politically, but also artistically.