War consecration
2023
These rituals deal with one of the oldest themes of mankind, war, from different perspectives. During the development phase, artists, amateurs and professionals explored this European and global theme and developed extraordinary encounters of contemporary music and poetic reflections, of “duels” between text and music, which attempt to create an intense emotional access to what the realities of war and wars mean for people and humanity. WARSHIP reminds us of a warning, the always necessary warning of the destruction of man by man. One hundred years after the Great Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar, KRIEGSWEIHE is inspired by the principle of thematically “playing” a city with and through the combination of different arts.
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About the individual installations and performances: 1. Responsibility Todesfuge Alma Baute is 18 years old and opens the overall performance KRIEGSWEIHE as the singer of a musical setting of texts from Paul Celan’s Todesfuge. Surrounded by three huge pressure chamber loudspeakers, each “firing” electric guitar siren sounds at increasing volumes of over 140 decibels, the young singer stands in the middle of an audible image of war. Her only resistance is her voice and the lament of a text that, in response to the horrors of the Second World War, invokes the indelible guilt of the perpetrators and the need to “face up to reality” and “stand up for each other”. A musical duel and painful perseverance against any assertion of the necessity of war and an answer to the senselessness of wars against people of whatever origin and affiliation. 2. contempt lake of blood In the center a “lake of blood”, surrounded by four loudspeakers from which a string quartet sounds, Beethoven’s Great Fugue op. 132. However, only one of the voices in this work can be heard from each of the four loudspeakers. The “sweet spot”, the ideal place where the audience can hear the entire string quartet ideally and purely, is in the center between the loudspeakers. Outside this “sphere”, level differences and transit times lead to distortions. The center between the loudspeakers must be entered by the audience, through a “lake of blood”. Only when a listener enters the center does a tempered atmosphere arise. But the “blood” remains symbolically attached to all those who seek and find the beauty of Beethoven’s fugue. What price are we prepared to pay for the happiness of perfection, for perfect enjoyment? An immersive, interactive sound installation questions the impossibility of innocence in a guilty world. 3. hope Embraced in death Hear the drums // again // war // man’s brand // hell’s loudest // most terrible // freedom not… On the shores of a lake, two singers face each other. Silent, two positions, irreconcilable. Not a word, silence, until a vocal duet begins. The argument is about the pros and cons of the necessity of man’s wars against man. Slowly, what began as a duet escalates into a desperate dialog that escalates into chaos. Two antagonistic positions fight in a vocal battle with archaic sounds and heavenly song. What moves between the singers is a war dissolved in music and words. Accompanied and determined by snare drums that play themselves as if by magic, these two “fighters” come closer and closer together. Everything ends in an image of unification, a pietà in which death silences everything. 4. hubris Seven Spirits The desire to forget is the theme of Lord Byron’s dramatic poem “Manfred”. Reminiscent of Goethe’s “Faust”, Byron’s title character suffers from his inability to fully comprehend the world. In his despair, he summons seven spirits to free him from the burden of knowledge and memory. These seven spirits exist in the urban space of Weimar, visible and audible as a sound installation. Seven loudspeaker sculptures arranged in a circle remind us of forgetting in words and music. Inspired by Byron’s “Manfred”, Seven Spirits tells the story of the life of a National Socialist who experienced and lived through a war. Even in old age, she believes she has the right to forget her deeds, all the wrongdoings of her life. It wants to forget at all costs and yet must live to remember. 5th Rausch Two marching bands, professional and amateur musicians, march towards each other in two musical battle lines in the middle of Weimar. A war-like constellation. The further apart the platoons are, the more insistently you hear the musical juxtaposition of marching drums, flappeless flutes, lyres, bass drum and cymbals. But the closer the marching battle lines get, the more their music intensifies and a common sound becomes apparent. Warlike distance finds unexpected harmony on the way to each other, to understanding the other, even a real togetherness could become possible. RAUSCH is the quantitative center of the performative ritual KRIEGSWEIHE. Spectators experience a RAUSCH as a central performance, audible and visible from afar in the heart of the city. 6th order In the history of wars, messengers on horseback delivered decisive messages of victory or defeat.
Horses carried warnings of approaching apocalypses on their backs or even death and destruction to the cities, as in the Trojan War. In the presence of the performance KRIEGSWEIHE, another horse moves through a city. But it has long since lost its messenger, its fate-determining messages and its own dangerousness. What remains is a constructivist-looking horse torso, a steed without a rider, but with a voice that chants wildly thrown-together fragments of text. In the best Dadaist manner, it speaks and sings of war, death and destruction, of the pleasure of slaughter, of a double battle in distant times, Goethe’s oak tree in Buchenwald, the forester from Ettersberg. The horse seeks a new, perhaps contemporary message, a new order and yet finds only the eternal abysses of war. This neo-apocalyptic creature is accompanied and moved by a bizarre pair of clowns, its guides, who themselves don’t know where to go. Their journey together takes them past the individual rituals of the KRIEGSWEIHE and ends at the stone statue of two great poets and humanists, Goethe and Schiller, directly in front of the National Theater. 7th Kill Krieg – A Gala Everything ends on the stage of a theater. A horse, texts, musicians, performers, a libretto, clever thoughts, the war. At the end of KRIEGSWEIHE, the war itself stands before a tribunal on the stage of the tradition-steeped National Theater. In 8 waltz variations, with beguilingly beautiful singing, a grand piano, a player piano, a string orchestra and a poisonously poetic libretto, an opera-theatrical performance undertakes the impossible in our realities: To “kill” the war. It all begins in beauty and escalates piece by piece into a final duel between a female accuser and the accused. Necessarily exaggerated, yet realistic, our socially helpless relationship to war is negotiated. Because only one breath lies between the commitment to life or death. It is about forgotten responsibility, the contempt that drives us into wars, the blood we shed for and against war, human hubris, unbridled intoxication and the order that protects people from themselves. The singer Jelena Kuljić as the accuser and Julian Mehne as Krieg drive each other on, with and against the libretto by the Austrian author Lydia Haider. On this evening, people settle accounts with themselves, their worst enemy, as inexorably as they are merciless. Beauty meets horror, fiction meets reality and the war, whoever it is, is alive, dead or alive.
August 31 to September 3, 2023 Kunstfest Weimar
Allianz Foundation Thuringian State Chancellery Kunstfest Weimar Volkstheater Vienna Orchestre della Svizzeria Italiana
Marc Sinan Artistic direction
Lydia Haider Libretto
Holger Kuhla Stage adaptation and dramaturgy
Isabel Vollrath Costumes
Miriam Baute Design
Volker Greve Sound design
Ilija Dordevič, Anthony Dunphy Sensory design
Felix Seidel Light Design
Marc David Ferrum, Wiebke Wesselmann Project management Berlin
Marcus Max Schreiner Project management Weimar
Alma Baute Vocals
Johanna Vargas Vocals
Andreas Fischer Vocals
Jelena Kuljić Vocals
Julian Mehne Vocals Magdalena Cerezo piano
Zora Slokar voice, horn
Uli Langenbein Performance
Rieke Schuberty Performance
Lukas Miko voice
Kyiv Symphony OrchestraEnsembleMetamorphosisSpielmannszugBad LangensalzaSpielmannszugMellingenThomasMüller Photos
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