CARTE BLANCHE

“Only you can save yourself. In any system.”

A LABORATORY OF THE ARTS

ARILA SIEGERT REHEARSES ÜBER DIE MAUER AFTER WASSILY KANDINSKY

Choreographer and director Arila Siegert is currently working with the experimental artist group Violett on a synaesthetic realisation of the 1914 stage composition Über die Mauer by Wassily Kandinsky. The world premiere is planned for early October at the Akademie der Künste. Rather than reconstructing a historical production, it is more of an attempt to open a space for a certain way of working that is not defined in classical genres, but in an experimental situation in which all media are potentially present, and the sensory perception of all participants can unfold.

“For me, it is about initiating or revealing an inner existential creativity. Not taking the outward path, but an inner one: the experience of what Kandinsky calls the psychic. Or of what moves us, what helps us, what also enables us to experience this life as a miracle – the sounds, the colours. How someone says something. What energy do we feel coming towards us? What does it mean to turn away or to turn towards? These are the things we experience every day and that we have to decipher. And I see a forward-looking approach in Kandinsky, because he sees the arts in their potentialities side by side, acting freely. It is always a matter of what is essential now…. It’s about cold and warmth, brightness and darkness. Where can one leave out objects and what happens to the colours?”

Siegert interprets Kandinsky’s text as you would test tubes in a laboratory. Language sets tasks to which actors can respond with their artistic capabilities. A space in which decisions are taken on the spur of the moment. At the same time, Über die Mauer can be understood as a didactic piece that, as with works by Oskar Schlemmer or Paul Klee, examines the aesthetic effects of forms and colours on painting – and also on theatre.

Through her in-depth discussions with Kandinsky, Gret Palucca also taught this abstract thinking – with the materials and fundamentals of aesthetic effects – at her school in Dresden, instilling it in Arila Siegert as a young student from the very beginning.

“My work is concerned with an origin, with going back to my inner motivation. What is it that moves me? Where am I with myself? Where do I feel power and where am I powerless? That is my own seismograph, if you like. I also distance myself from things that drain my strength and leave me empty. I look for things that give me a strong presence. It’s an attempt to resist being sucked dry by the media. I try to bring strength to the physical basis of our perception and experience. Everything is within us: the light, the colours, the forms, everything. It makes sense to remember this, to feel it, to experience it. It is an antidote to alienation from each other, but also from ourselves. No one can relieve us of this inner work.”

The quotes have been taken from a conversation between Arila Siegert and Johannes Odenthal that took place in May 2021 during rehearsals for Über die Mauer.

JOHANNES ODENTHAL is the programme director of the Akademie der Künste.

THOUGHT LABORATORY Arila Siegert

The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, born out of opposition to the grand designs of Richard Wagner’s musical and dramatic work, also attracted the attention of the painter and synaesthete Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944). At the turn of the century, many artists were expecting the great transition from the material to the spiritual.

In the age of Albert Einstein and Max Planck, even Kandinsky could not escape the growing influence of science. This is evidenced by the almanac Der Blaue Reiter published with Franz Marc in 1911, his major theoretical work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, published in the same year, and his doctrine of form, Point and Line to Plane, published in 1926.

The purpose of my book Concerning the Spiritual in Art and of Der Blaue Reiter was to awaken the ability to experience the spiritual in material and abstract things, which is absolutely necessary at this time and makes endless experiences possible.

Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911 (Bern, 1952)

For Kandinsky, the sound of music – the most abstract of the arts – serves as a cipher for the sound of colour and light, of movement and dance, of words and music. For Kandinsky, this harmony of the arts could best find expression on the stage as a “stage composition”. At the same time as Arnold Schönberg, who as a composer was concerned with overarching conceptions of the stage, Kandinsky in his stage compositions – which are also to be understood as stage directions – examined the interaction of the various art forms without their merging.

This is the very union of the arts, where they all speak together, but each in its own language, and there is, unintentionally, an impulse that underlies our compositions. We want any art to come to the fore when it, and it in particular, can say the necessary most forcefully in a minute.

Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Theater, 1907–14 (Ostfildern, 1998)

Gret Palucca’s dances were more abstract than those of her teacher Mary Wigman, and this earned her invitations to the Bauhaus in the 1920s. Kandinsky appreciated the abstract clarity of Palucca’s forms of movement, the attention to detail, and compositional coherence. Thus, the ideas of Bauhaus members – and especially of László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee – were incorporated into the lessons I then enjoyed at the Palucca School in Dresden and with Palucca. Mastering space, working from the inside out, strictly working on a form once found, from content to form and not the other way around, not allowing oneself any sentimentality, but surrendering oneself to one’s ideas, not copying or imitating etc., was the maxim, which an artist, using his imagination, must work his way towards to achieve his potential, also, and above all, through improvisation as a preliminary stage. Slavish specialisation was frowned upon, and progress and change, rather than stagnation, were demanded. Music, colours, literature, and painting, sculpture, architecture, and nature were important elements in the artist’s confrontation with his movement inventions.

We ourselves, resonating in her dance, derive our movements from strength and vitality and mastery. Palucca condenses space, she structures it: the space revolves, sinks and floats, fluctuating in all directions. And it grows, tenses, loosens and multiplies.

László Moholy-Nagy, 1920s, in Edith Krull and Werner Gommlich, Palucca (Berlin, 1964)

All art requires limitation. But within this limitation, ultimate intensity and shaping. I have experienced this in my work, the only teacher the artist has when he or she goes his or her own way. At the beginning there is instinct, and at the end art. It is a matter of never sacrificing nature to art.

Gret Palucca, 1920s, in Edith Krull and Werner Gommlich, Palucca (Berlin 1964)

Palucca’s New Artistic Dance was based on tapping one’s creative talent and originality, recognising one’s own powers as a creator and performer, having the courage to be oneself and to step out of oneself, and an interest in translating thoughts and feelings into dance through one’s own body. In doing so, she suggested that an artist must expose him- or herself to the criticism of respected, more experienced artists. We should not surround ourselves with people who mainly just praise us, and we should not follow fashion.

Perfect mastery is impossible without exactitude. Exactitude is the result of prolonged labour. But the disposition to exactitude is innate and an extremely important condition of great talent. Palucca’s dance is versatile and can be illuminated from different points of view. What I would like to emphasise here, however, is the rarely exact structure not merely of dance in its temporal development, but first and foremost the exact structure of individual moments that are captured in snapshots.

Wassily Kandinsky, “Tanzkurven. Zu den Tänzen der Palucca”, Das Kunstblatt, vol 10, no. 3 (1926)

So I have always sought closeness to this artistic way of thinking, one which is familiar to me, and have engaged, among other things, with Kandinsky’s stage compositions: The Yellow Sound in 1993 and Violett in 2019. From the experience of working on Violett, created for the Bauhaus centenary in Dessau, we formed the Violett artists’ group.

With this group of artists, we worked on Kandinsky’s piece Über die Mauer in April 2021, which will premiere on 1 October 2021 at the Black Box of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

Keep your ear open to music, open your eye to painting. And do not think. Examine, if you will, after you have heard, after you have seen. Ask yourself, if you will, whether this work has ‘carried you off’ into a world previously unknown to you. If so, what more do you want?

Wassily Kandinsky, “Der Wert eines Werkes der konkreten Kunst”, 1938, in Wassily Kandinsky, Essays über Kunst und Künstler (Stuttgart, 1955)

It appeals to me, and I find it important again today to confront the issues of Kandinsky’s writings, to initiate a thought laboratory. This laboratory challenges the participating artists again and again to engage creatively through memory, imagination, invention, and improvisation.

The law of the subordination of the elements and the construction to the inner aim of the work – composition. Theatre laboratories are to be organised where individual elements are to be tested in the sense and for the purpose of theatre.

Wassily Kandinsky, “Über die abstrakte Bühnensynthese”, 1919-23, in Wassily Kandinsky, Essays über Kunst und Künstler (Stuttgart, 1955)

ARILA SIEGERT received her artistic training under Gret Palucca in Dresden. Her first job took her to the dance theatre of the Komische Oper Berlin, under Walter Felsenstein and Tom Schilling. She then became first soloist to the Semperoper Dresden, where she founded her first dance theatre at the Staatsschauspiel in 1987. Her self-choreographed solo performances have taken her all over the world, she has staged fulllength ballets in Berlin, Leipzig, Cologne, and Vienna, worked with Ruth Berghaus and Peter Konwitschny, and directed the Bauhausbühne Dessau. Her first opera production was Verdi’s Macbeth in Ulm in 1998, and she has directed over forty more productions since then. In 2014, she made her debut as a director in the USA with The Magic Flute in Florida. Arila Siegert has received the Critics’ Dance Award, the Federal Cross of Merit, and is a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and Dresden.

The unique power of your play is neither in the mastery of actors nor in their emotional expressions on the stage. It is the combination of everything and the destruction of everything. Its painted messy colours and human bodies integrated into this mess of colours; the mix of forms – an explosion of multiple expressions and freedom of these expressions – this all moves me deeply.

And seeing this play also changed something inside me. The point is that I used to doubt my judgement of art, actually I avoid using the word “art” when talking about things which I feel emotionally connected to. There are simply too many things that I find extensively beautiful, which touch me on a special emotional level, which I would love to call art – but who am I to name anything “art”, what do I know about “art”?

Your performance somehow answered the doubts I had about the hunger I felt for so many expressions. It made me think that I am open rather than uneducated, I am alive rather than uncritical, I am grateful for all the beauty of the world. So that’s it: I feel freer; after I saw your play, I feel more powerful, confident, more adult, and feel more than ever the necessity to see, to feel, to create.

Thank you, Mila

MILA TESHAIEVA, born in Kiev in 1974, lives in Berlin. In her work she focuses on constructed social identities and the political manipulation of history and memory, combining a documentary aspect with artistic interpretation. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, with her most recent exhibitions being at MIT Museum in Boston, Massachusetts (USA), Museum of European Cultures (Germany), the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee (USA), the Alma Löv Museum (Sweden), and the West Coast Art Museum (Germany). Promising Waters (2013) and InselWesen (2016) were published by Kehrer Verlag. She is a member of Ostkreuz – Agentur der Fotografen.

The team is made up of the Violett group of artists: Music /sound: Ali N. Askin Choreography/direction: Arila Siegert Actress: Kerstin Schweers Actor: Jörg Thieme Dancer/singer: Isabel Wamig Projection painting: Helge Leiberg Set/wardrobe/props: Marie-Luise Strandt Lighting: Susanne Auffermann Dramaturgy: Carola Cohen-Friedländer