Physical Dramaturgy: Ein (neuer) Trend?

Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more more

GoetheInstitute

22/06/2007

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 22.06.2007

In an interview, Marina Litvinenko, the widow of the murdered former KGB officer, calls Vladimir Putin and not Andre Lugovi, who has been charged, the actual man behind the polonuim attack (news story). "I think that he was pushed to this murder by Putin and his functionaries. My thesis is that the murder was blamed on Russian dissidents in London so that they would lose the support of the British establishment." Litvinenko speculates further that it was a planned murder that caused her husband to leave the secret service. "The turning point came in 1997, when he was transferred to a secret subdivision. Sasha was told to kill Boris Beresovsky (more), who had been a long-time advisor to the Kremlin. Sasha and one of his colleagues didn't want to become the playthings of a political intrigue and informed Beresovsky. In panic, Sasha confided in his former boss; from then on he was considered a traitor."

"Productive failure" is what Niklas Maak observes at this summer's Documenta exhibition for contemporary art. A field of poppies planned by one artist has sprouted nothing but weeds, street cleaners removed Chilean artist Lotty Rosenfeld's white crosses from the street where she'd stuck them, and now a storm has toppled Ai Wei Wei's tower made from old door and window shutters (photos). "Even before the storm, Ai Wei Wei's 'Template' looked corroded and monstrous, like a huge sculpture raised after being submerged for years in the watery depths. Now it looks like a crumpled, archaic machine equipped with mill wheels, whose purpose remains a mystery. Yet strangely, it appears much more elegant than it did before. Its creator is thrilled, and doesn't want to have it rebuilt. 'It's much better than it was,' Ai Wei Wei says. 'Now the power of nature is visible. Art takes on real beauty with such emotions.'"
(Read our feature "Summer of political art" on Documenta 12.)


Frankfurter Rundschau
22.06.2007

Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab considers the Israelis more responsible than the Islamists for the chaos in the Palestinian territories. The Palestinians are not yet masters of their own fate, he writes. "Some Palestinians plea for an end to the farce of Palestinian independence. This position, publicly represented by Dr. Ali Jirbawi at Birzeit University, would mean giving all power and responsibility to the Israelis, rejecting all transitional solutions and thus pressuring Israel to take full responsibility for the security and economic provision of the occupied territories, or to sign a final agreement in which Israel guarantees the Palestinians complete sovereignty and territorial integrity."

Polish historian Robert Zurek criticises the "paternalism" with which the German media treats his homeland, making Poland responsible for the failed process of EU unification, rather than the French and the Dutch, who voted "no" to the EU constitution. "Different standards seem to be applied to the eastern neighbours. Here we find terms like 'nonsense', 'arrogance' or 'audacity'; serious consequences are threatened, even punishment. And that in Germany's leading media. The scheme is black and white. The Polish position is judged to be egotistical and destructive, the Poles are called cynical smarty-pants who want to exploit the EU for their own purposes or who claim they don't understand what constructive EU membership means."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.06.2007

In contemporary theatre, the director becomes the author, and the author becomes the medium, writes Christopher Schmidt on the Mülheimer Theatertagen, a contemporary theatre festival that ended earlier this month. "It's increasingly the case that productions turn the stage over to the audience. They pass microphones through the rows and transform themselves into any number of things: public forums for truth-protocols, pirated copies and notations. In this way theatre becomes a content-merger, a provider, a heat reservoir and an old-fashioned radio. Director Philip Tiedemann has taken this trend to its extreme, and parodied it at the same time. At the beginning of this season, for instance, he turned a passing joke into an evening of theatre by staging the Hamburg telephone book."

Bulgarian author Vladimir Zarev hopes that with its entry into the EU, his country will finally be delivered from the chaos of the post-transitional phase. "We're expecting especially hard punishment for the former director of Sofia's central heating company, who everyone here simply calls 'Valentin the warm.' Despite his salary of just 600 euros a month, in a short time he was able to amass over 15 million euros in Austrian accounts and Bulgarian safes. Things were just the opposite with his customers: although they were increasingly thrifty and many had their radiators shut off altogether, their heating bills just kept going up."


nachtkritik 22.06.2007

Felizitas Ammann saw "The Visit" by Friedrich Dürrenmatt's in Zürich, staged by Rimini Protokoll – well not really staged; the performance was a recollection of the play's premiere 51 years ago. "Hans Städeli, the stage technician at the time, described in detail what was going on behind the stage. He recalled the pauses and former colleagues, the drawing floor (picture) and the two firemen who were standing ready, each with a bucket of water. That is the only and very entertaining declaration of love to the clumsy theatre apparatus that has not really changed despite all the new technologies. Städeli was interrupted by a stage manager who kept throwing in his two cents worth, with calls for the historical and contemporary stagings – the various eras kept running together."

Get the signandsight newsletter for regular updates on feature articles.
signandsight.com - let's talk european.

 
More articles

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.
read more

From the feuilletons

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talks   about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west. Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatified Pope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.
read more

From the feuilletons

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not sure that Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin's incendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class.
read more