2022 KUNSTSCHNEE (english: ART SNOW)
Kunstschnee is what I never really wanted to do: an experimental music theater.
But before I go into details and then to the blog that will accompany the project, a short explanation of the first sentence.
Experimental art sounds like it’s not really art at all. And basically that’s how I see it: if you don’t know what’s coming out, you call it an „experiment,“ and if you don’t know what it is, it must be art. So much for the bon mots. Neither to the one nor to the other I feel attracted. Neither do I want to shirk my responsibility for what I want to create, nor do I want to give away what I can create. Moreover, I believe in art and in the possibility of art in the sense that art shows itself recognizably as art. The game of hiding, one should look for and find art in everyday life bores me in the vast majority of cases. That’s why I also do music theater, which for me means that the music, the so-called content, takes place in a theater, in a very special place. (And when I look at the other project for this year’s MUSIKTHEATERTAGE, the bicycle opera RINGDING!, I also call the bicycle saddle a very special place. This place is sacred, is not profane, is separated from everyday life. And yet it is not a complete escapism. In RINGDING! confrontation with urban reality and friction with the noise of the world as resistance is the deeper intention. In Kunstschnee, on the other hand, reality becomes the material of the game. Space is expanded into cyber space, a „cyber space“ that we haven’t really had anything to do with since the 1990s. Today, we only call it „virtual“ when content finds its way to us via the devices.
So the confrontation here is with a virtual world space.
BLOG
In the following I would like to document relevant steps on this „journey“ through a music-theatrical collapsology in the manner of a work diary. On another page, the „répertoire“ will emerge, a book of performance materials.
Thursday, April 7, 2022
Discussed with Saskia the project as it is now conceived, in terms of participation by children and young people. In the process, despite all her gratifying enthusiasm for the project, I then pointed out to her that „collapsology“ carries the danger of a psychological downward spiral. If now the young people after the depressing and very unsettling long time of the pandemic, a period of time, which they will not get back in their life like all of us, now with the horrible developments by the Russian war of aggression in the Ukraine also with the horrors of those senseless violence and horrors now also further apocalyptic horsemen are served up, If they are told that this is art, and that art is still important and valuable for society, and participation in society, then unforeseeable mental and cultural problems can arise. So I told her that I was aware of this, and here, as far as possible, through the selection of the material in the repertoire, it is ensured that there are also less depressing messages, suggestions that we should also understand as tasks. This way to an awareness of our existence in the world, to think about the space and the need of our existence in this world, is the most important challenge of the present. Ultimately, we live in this world, and only this one life. The existential experience of our limitedness, I understand as an intensification of life, just as I see art as an intensification of life. Both are inseparable.
With Markus we discussed the object that is to inflated. It occurred to me that here would be the possibility, an original idea, that everyone would have something to do together, something like, for example, build a ship, inflate this object with a double lift pump. However, we calculated a working time of 17 hours for the necessary 100,000 liters of air! Nevertheless: All those participating in the performance – that is all those present – will try to inflate the object . . .