Magazine #14 of the Federal Cultural Foundation / Kulturstiftung des Bundes

texts by regina bittner gabriele brandstetter michael kleeberg stefan koldehoff wojciech kuczok dorion weickmann

et.al.

1 2 3 4

1 Rudolf von Laban Neigung rechts 5A-Skala [Tilt right 5A scale] (above), Neigung 2-(e) , (r0) aus der B-Skala [Tilt 2 -(e), (r0 ) from the B scale] (below), undated, photographer unknown [L] 2 No title, Jenny Gertz estate, undated, photogra pher unknown [L] 3 Poster advertising 2nd Dancer Congress of 1928 in Essen. Max Burchartz, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009 [L] 4 No information given [L]

»I praise the dance, for it frees people from the heaviness of matter and binds the isolated to community. I praise the dance, which demands everything: health and a clear spirit and a buoy ant soul. O man, learn to dance, or else the angels in heaven will not know what to do with you.« We do not know whether St. Augustine, theologian, philosopher of late antiquity, and one of the most influential fathers of the Church, was referring to his personal experience with dance. Yet amazingly enough, St. Au gustine grasped an essential aspect of dance that still holds true today. At least this is what the articles in this special dance issue seem to say. Freed from the heaviness of matter in his literary essay Foreplay , Michael Kleeberg describes the incred ible lightness of dancing in his first erotic encounters on the dance floor. Dorion Weickmann portrays the hubris with which we praise dance as the miracle drug for physical and men tal fitness. Gabriele Brandstetter considers the commu nity-building and culturally-connecting power of dance, while Christina Deloglu wonders why dance films are cult and why they’re especially appealing to teenagers. In selecting pieces for this dance issue, we wanted to show our readers that dancing is not only relevant to experts. In daily life and at special occa sions, dancing is more popular and widespread in society than many other artistic forms of expression. Could it be that our rela tionship to dance is rudimentary because we know less about it and its history than about literature, theatre, film and the fine arts? Could it be that dance struggles to gain public recognition for its cultural significance because we are simply too poorly trained in understanding the language of dance?

With this issue we »praise the dance«, knowing well that dance lives in the shadows of its more illustrious relatives as far as public perception goes. Of course, the Dance Plan Germany , initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation, has done much to improve the national structures of contemporary dance for the long term. However, when the massive funding measures conclude in 2010, there will still be a lot of work to do. We are confident that the dance scene has gained valuable experience from the support of the past five years which will continue to strengthen its educational efforts and help cultural policymak ers secure new funding in the future. The Dance Plan is coordi nating its second major dance congress, which will take place in Hamburg from 5 to 8 November 2009. It has invited dance ex perts from the practical and scientific fields to work on solving the problems facing dance in Germany in the future and develop strategies for anchoring dance in cultural politics. And it also offers us an occasion to produce a dance issue, for which we scoured an enormous amount of photo material in the dance ar chives in Cologne and Leipzig. We are grateful to Thomas Tho rausch and Bettina Hesse (Cologne) and Dr. Janine Schulz (Leip zig) for their extensive help and support. With their special com bination of passion and precision, Daniela Haufe and Detlef Fiedler (cyan, Berlin) selected the photo material for this issue. Although space is limited, these photos exemplify the incredible wealth of our dance heritage.

As always we have provided our readers with an overview of the projects which we are currently funding, and insights into the work of our larger programmes. With regard to the KUR

Programme for the Conservation of Moveable Cultural Assets, Stefan Koldehoff reveals fundamental problems with pre serving our cultural heritage indefinitely. Regina Bittner examines the legacy of the Moravian city Zlín, one of the only planned cities in Europe, where the shoe manufacturer Bata built his vision of a utopia of modernity . This was also the title of an international conference, part of the ZIPP GermanCzech Cultural Projects , which commemorated and investigated the lessons of this legacy. In her report on the fate of Home Game theatre projects, Michaela Schlagen werth describes how theatre artists collaborated with residents of their city to research and produce plays with locally-specific themes in unusual ways. And finally, we conclude our literary series Fathers & Sons with a short story by the Polish writer Wojciech Kuczok, titled How we failed to over throw Communism . In commemoration of the 20th anniver sary of European unity, we asked young writers from Central and Eastern European countries to write about their personal memories and describe how the social and political upheaval in fluenced the relationships between fathers and their sons.

dance michael kleeberg foreplay 6 interview with hortensia völckers »we can only change things through experience« 13 dorion weickmann ultraslim and supersmart? 21 gabriele brandstetter nomadic dance 24 christina deloglu a dream come true 32

fathers and sons wojciech kuczok

how we failed to overthrow communism 35 kur stefan koldehoff sisyphus at the museum 38 zipp regina bittner rise to the ovation 44 home game michaela schlagenwerth the audience loves it 46

news 49 projects 50 committees 55

The photos in this issue are among the many treasures stored in the dance archives in Cologne and Leipzig. Although this issue is awash with images from these archives, we were only able to show you the tip of the iceberg. Making the right choice was an agoniz ing task. We constantly asked ourselves which pictures had made a mark on the cultural memory of dance, and which were missing? The Federal Cultural Foundation does not only support contemporary dance with its Dance Plan Germany , but is also com mitted to documenting the history of dance and having it publicly recognized as an integral element of our cultural heritage. The transient art of dance faces special challenges if it wishes to preserve its own history and use it for current and future develop ments. This is why the Dance Plan also included the dance archives in its funding catalogue. The pictures from the archives shown here were selected based on the wish to create a panorama of dance that extends beyond the art of contemporary dance and establishes it as a comprehensive cultural practice. /// The captions correspond to the descriptions found on the reverse side of the photos. In some cases, we were unable to determine the photographer despite extensive research. Therefore, we publish these photos, understanding that entitlements and copyrights can be claimed by their rightful owners. [C] = Cologne [L] = Leipzig

Hortensia Völckers / Executive Board of the Alexander Farenholtz Federal Cultural Foundation

1 St. Moritz, Switzerland, Dancing men on a Sunday afternoon, undated, photo: Keystone [C] 2 Mary Wigman, Berlin at Wildpfad 30, June 1941, photographer unknown [C] 3 Strike at the Olida meat factory in Paris, 1936, photo: Keystone [C] 4 Writing on reverse: Madagascar in Paris. Dancers from Madagascar per forming wild war dances at the Colonial Exhibition. 1936, photo: Keystone [C] 5 Festival of the French prov inces in Nice, undated, photo: Keystone [C]

foreplay

by michael kleeberg

For a long time, I considered dance nothing more than the neces sary foreplay to the sexual act.

Of course, in my young teenage years, the act was never consummated, but was a possibility in theory and fantasy. It was as close to sex as I could get. Dancing was the only legitimate way of touching a girl, coming in close physical contact, so close to evoke that unbelievable and unfamiliar feeling of excitement. The fact that you had to keep moving the whole time was a neces sary evil. And by closing your eyes, you could easily imagine away the clothes you were both wearing. For most boys like me between fourteen and twenty-four, dancing was the means to an end. A ploy, because in those years the 1970s a boy could not expect that a girl wanted this same kind of intimate contact. Actually, it was inconceivable. Therefore, we had to outsmart them, and practically the only way we had of doing this was to dance with them.

But can we really call what we did, dancing? Because what we boys were waiting so impatiently for at school parties, private get-togethers, community dances, etc., were the few slow dances that a sympathetic disc jockey would toss in after every fifteen or twenty songs what we used to appropriately call the stand ing blues in my hometown in Swabia. No one in their right mind would have called standing blues dancing. It was ob vious that it was nothing more than a concession to us teen-age, hormone-crazy boys.

I remember there were two types of male dancers at those gettogethers. There were the guys who flirted during the normally fast songs when there was no touching. Sometimes it wasn’t even clear who was dancing with whom. They’d show off like rutting pigeons with fluffed necks and plumes and fanned tails, strutting back and forth in front of the females, cutting off their path of retreat, wiggling their butts and cooing ridiculously.

Then there were the boys who made no attempt to hide their in tentions, waited out the fast songs and immediately pounced on the girls on the dance floor as soon as the slow song began. As if they were at the amusement park, rushing to grab a free bumper car before the siren sounded.

As for myself, I belonged to the group of compromisers who put on a brave face, fidgeted and jerked around on the dance floor just so we’d be ready and close to our partners when Child in Time by Deep Purple came on. You have to remember, we were in Böblingen, and nothing was as crushing to a boy’s reputation as unmanly, exalted, girlish behaviour and John Travolta and Michael Jackson weren’t around yet.

My generation was probably the first in the 20th century to no longer cultivate the traditional partner dance, the ballroom dance, which most likely disappeared from youngsters’ lives be tween Rock’n’Roll and the Twist. A loss of culture, in my opin ion, looking back on it today. Because even if the male teenag-

ers of previous generations shared my opinion of dance and pur sued similar goals as we did (women dance for completely different reasons), the choreography of their dances, from the waltz to the foxtrot, forced young men to exercise restraint and disci pline, which was totally lost on us as we rubbed ourselves against our female dance partners like animals.

I believe dance, like some parts of society, is returning to a period of tribalization and barbarism, for which the loss of complex rules and forms of etiquette is only an example. We can also see this in the tendency to dance by and for oneself, a form of exhibi tionism, autism, a celebration of one’s body as a unique artwork with all its piercings, tattoos, fake fingernails, pumped muscles and an aura of the hermaphroditic. Such a third sex no longer needs a dancing partner, just an audience doesn’t need sex, just Facebook

The triumphant arrival of discos, later called clubs, began in my youth, but what a difference there was between the harmless Seestudio in Böblingen which, at age 15, I went to after a classmate told me that’s where I could get a certain girl I liked to notice me, and the bright, white Bhagwan Discotheque in HamburgPöseldorf, to which I took a model friend of mine ten years later to present myself as modern and trendy in a new, post-apoca lyptic world of pleasure that was just beginning in the early eight ies. And how different that was compared to the techno disco I went to with a group of colleagues while on a business trip in London at the end of the nineties. The infernal noise took my breath away, and since then, it has become my image of hell. If there truly is as Dante would say a personal hell for every one, then that is what mine would look like, although I believe I could afford to expand my list of sins a little before I’d have to descend into that hell.

I am not all too ashamed to admit that the basis of my relation ship to dance was for the most part sexually driven. After all, in its infancy in early civilizations, dance was nothing more than either a choreographed religious or fertility ritual both of which quite often overlapped. Over the course of thousands of years, it spawned numerous forms of high culture church wor ship, tragedies, operas, sports and porno films.

Early in my life, even before puberty, I became a person of words, that is, someone who creates, justifies and defends his identity and position in groups and society with words, and not with the body. Growing up in Swabia, that made me a minority and an outsider, as reputations were formed by the body and its achieve ments. Dance was communication that occurred exclusively through the body. It seemed strange and suspicious to me very early on, it was territory I had no desire to explore, and as a result, I had to begin playing it down. A disco the place where it’s too loud to communicate with words has always been a hostile environment for me.

However, when I was sixteen and attended a graduation party for the senior class, I discovered that I had been fooling myself dur ing puberty, instrumentalizing dance for the purpose of initiat ing a sexual relationship. Something utterly embarrassing hap pened to me, and perhaps that’s why I remember it as if it was yesterday. I was wearing my usual party attire white jeans that were so tight that it took me forever to put them on and even longer to peel them off like a sausage skin, so tight that you could see whatever I was feeling through them, which in my youthful naiveté, I thought to be especially attractive and seduc tive. It was the night it finally happened the one and only thing I had always fantasized about. As I pressed myself up closely to one of the graduating girls, she actually took the bone of contention in her hand and said something similiar to Mae West’s famous line »Is that a gun in your pocket are you just happy to see me?« at which point she invited me to follow her into one of the many empty classrooms.

It was too much for me. Too much, too concrete, too suddenly Rhodos, that I didn’t dare take the leap. This confirmation of my tactics, this straightforward proof of my theory that dance only represented foreplay was shocking to me. Like Joseph before Mut-em-enet, Potiphar’s wife, I felt transformed into an ass, flee ing from her with rambling explanations and excuses, each one more ridiculous and flimsy than the next. The fact that I was able to keep my shirt on was only a small consolation.

Years later, as I began leading a normal, adult love-life, no longer warped by chronic shyness, cowardice and clumsiness, dancing didn’t play much of a role in my life. It was no longer necessary.

But how did it all begin? What are my earliest memories of dance? My parents used to tell me about the lavish balls they attended when they were young, and later about the dance orchestras and swing music of the early post-war years. But I only saw them dance once or twice a year in the festival tent at our town fair. My mother told me she’d taken dance classes and had been an avid dancer, especially when her partner could also dance well. This was incomprehensible to my father who admitted that he had felt jealous when other men danced with her. For my father, if dancing with another man was fun to her, how could he not be a competitor? And for my mother, she couldn’t understand what the one thing had to do with the other.

Whenever I watched them dance as a child, they danced the two dances that were sufficient for every occasion the waltz and a makeshift dance for all songs in four-four time, a dance our family vividly described as the slide.

And so the stiff-necked, heavy-footed couples would slide across the wooden floorboards of the beer tent, joined by a few fops who were known around town as passionate dancers. With Bril liantine in their hair, they’d thrust their right elbows out, heads cocked over their right shoulders as if they were parking a car,

1 Susanne Linke in Schritte Verfolgen [Following Steps], solo dance performance in collaboration with VA Wölfl, 1985, photo: gert-weigelt.de [C] 2 Valeska Gert in Ca naille , undated, photo: Lily Baruch [C] 3 Constanza Carrys, named The Little Pavlova Postcard, Iris Verlag, photo: »Gertrud«, Vienna [C]

pumping their partner’s right hand up and down in time with the music, as if they alone were responsible for providing the town’s water supply.

It was not a pretty sight for children’s eyes, but rather a bizarre performance for eight or nine-year-olds, for whom nothing is more important than that their parent’s preserve their dignity, or what they believed was dignity (which often implied not hav ing fun).

Thanks to Hollywood films, I became aware that there were dif ferences, aesthetic differences in the way one moves dancing or otherwise and that these were differences of life. It was my first encounter with dance as an art form.

The first films with Fred Astaire and his ever-changing partners, mainly Ginger Rogers, of course, were a revelation to me. For the first time in my life, I witnessed grace. For the first time, I wit nessed elegance. And when Fred Astaire was joined by Gene Kelly, the further evolution of the athletic-plebeian man who defies the laws of gravity and deconstructs the myth that man is a lump of clay, I witnessed the impossible. It was the solution of the dilemma, rooted in outdated male role models which I grew up with and the Swabian code of behaviour, of which I was a victim, namely, how one could be both elegant and athletic, a dancer and a man, how one could unite sophistication (which I desired) and physical consciousness (which I didn’t possess) with artistic beauty. Only in theory, of course.

With Gene Kelly, the unattainable (for us mortals) became reali ty. With Fred Astaire, the indescribable became an indisputable fact. Until that point, my role model for grace had been Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp in John Ford’s My Darling Clemen tine . How he tipped back in his chair on the veranda in Tomb stone with perfect balance, gazing at the far-off mountain tops of Monument Valley, how he reluctantly agreed to dance at the church fair and executed a perfect square dance with the absolute dignity of a man whose balance was unshakeable that’s the kind of man I aspired to become, admired by the ladies and feared by the villains.

But Astaire and Kelly took it one step further. When moving normally or demonstrating superhuman elegance and breath taking expression in dance, they no longer had to overcome an inner reluctance. The bodies of these gods spoke a language more clearly and artistically than words. And what were they speaking of? At the time, I couldn’t decipher or understand it, but now I know it was, of course, sexuality.

What did they say about the dream couple Astaire/Rogers in the 1930s? »He gives her class and she gives him sex.«

Certainly, the overwhelming success of the musicals of the thir ties and forties was also due in part to the Hayes Code Holly wood’s attempt at self-censorship which forbade, for example, a scene of a woman on a bed unless both her feet were touching the floor. When I was young, I didn’t realize that every dance scene was actually a metaphor for sexual intercourse a fact I’ve only come to appreciate since movies began showing explicit sex scenes which don’t even come close to the erotic force evoked by the big musical numbers. And the passing of musicals oc curred almost simultaneously with the liberalization of moral standards in American movies.

Later on, I kept on dancing the standing blues — not only because of the unconscious lesson these musical numbers taught me (an eternal amateur and klutz in comparison), but also because of what I learned from An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain , a lesson I didn’t quite understand at first and couldn’t yet put into practice. At certain moments of sheer elation, dance could catapult one beyond the arena of fore play and become a unique celebration of oneself, of one’s body, in an oblivious, incredibly expressive show of the joy of being. It wasn’t necessary to have a partner (or one of the opposite sex), but simply to explore the space of one’s body without any explicit purpose.

Gene Kelly’s unforgettable night-time dance through the pud dles of Paris, Donald O’Connor’s breathtaking choreography in Make ’em Laugh , and both of them in Fit as a Fiddle and Moses Supposes , were examples of the homo ludens, the human being unfettered by the bonds of functionality and so cial conventions. That was art. That was the kind of art that slaps you in the face like the words of a Zen master, or that particular painting or musical composition that declares: You must change your life.

The fact that this experience wasn’t elicited by Cranko during my childhood in Stuttgart, or Neumeier as a young adult in Hamburg, or Nureyev, Sylvie Guillem or Karin Saporta while I lived in Paris, but rather by Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire is probably a sociological phenomenon. There are certain social classes that go to the cinema and not to the ballet or opera house and what Hans didn’t learn as a child, he may never learn as an adult. I did find my way to opera as I grew older, but not to ballet. Do I regret it? To a degree.

Years later I lived in France and hadn’t danced anymore, except at weddings, yet I became acquainted with another dimension of dance that I had not seen or understood before. Dance as a community-building phenomenon, as a display of good will, an expression of not only being tolerated by others (also by stran gers), but to be assimilated by them for a certain period of time. As Goethe would say: Here I am Man, here dare it to be! I’m referring to the bals des pompiers , the popular dance parties organized by the fire departments in all quarters of Paris on the night before the 14th of July, the national public holiday. As parties, they were not high-class events some had a band, some had a small ratty-tatty orchestra, the rooms smelled like Merguez and soured rosé wine, but that didn’t dampen anyone’s spirits. Children danced with children, old women with old women, daring young lovers danced the salsa even if the music didn’t fit. If a stranger asked your wife to dance, you’d raise your glass good-naturedly, and you wouldn’t discriminate either and dance with any woman regardless of her age, scent or girth. Of course, I was initially distrustful of the seemingly phony and forced party mood until I realized that everyone there was genu inely happy to feel that sense of belonging and community at a time when people rarely have an opportunity to do so. Remem bering the supposedly or truly great moments of history like 1789 or 1944 when the French felt like one people, the partygoers cele brated that feeling once again in this innocent, but not meaning less revival.

So in the end, dance showed me the kind of person I was to quote Jean Paul Sartre someone »made of the stuff of all peo ple, and as valuable as everyone, and as valuable as anyone«.

Michael Kleeberg , born in Stuttgart in 1959, is a writer and literary translator of such authors as Marcel Proust, Joris-Karl Huysmans and John Dos Passos. After extended stays in Rome and Amsterdam, he moved to Paris where he lived for twelve years. Today he is a resident of Berlin. Kleeberg has received numerous literary awards, including the Anna Seghers Prize , the Lion Feuchtwanger Prize and most recently, the ›Mainzer Stadt schreiber 2008‹ literary award. As part of the project West Eastern Divan , funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, Kleeberg wrote the Leba nese travel diary Das Tier , das weint [The Animal That Cries] ( DVA , Mu nich 2004), in which he describes and reflects on his impressions of Beirut and his meetings with the writer Abbas Beydoun during his four-week stay there. Kleeberg’s most recent novel is titled Karlmann , published by DVA in Mu nich in 2007

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1 Tango Argentino, undated, photo: Regina Minwegen [C] 2 Student C Standard. Andreas Burger, Manuela Krause, STK Impulse Leipzig e.V., undated, photo: Klaus Zantke [C] 3 Letkiss »The New Dance: Let us kiss!«, photo: Hansa-Bild [C] 4 Gret Palucca »with students from the State Choreographic Institute in Stockholm«, undated, photo: Dagens Bild [C] 5 Letkiss »Even non-dancers can’t keep their legs still« 6 Jan. 1965, photo: dpa-Agentur [C] 6 Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Swing Waltz 8 Oct. 1936, photo: Keystone [C]

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1 Standard dance, undated, photo: Schirner Ber lin [C] 2 Postcard, Blohm Rostock 1908, photographer unknown [C] 3 Reinhild Hoffmann in Solo mit Sofa [Solo with sofa], 1980, photo: gert-weigelt.de [C]

»we can only change things through exper ence

Petra Kohse: Ms Völckers, the Federal Cultural Foundation is currently the most important funding institution for the field of dance in Germany. And the Dance Plan , which the Foundation initiated in 2005, is one of its most massive funding programmes. In your position on the Executive Board, do you see dance as a top priority?

Hortensia Völckers: We have to make it one. In comparison to other fields of high culture, dance is under-represented. Although over 70 municipally funded dance companies exist in Germany and their performances are well at tended, the performers themselves work under poor conditions at most venues. They require larger budgets to hire good dancers and have to engage guest choreographers, so that audiences don’t get bored with a style they’ve seen for the last five years.

Kohse: Why is dance funding so limited?

Völckers: In contrast to theatres with their elo quent, self-assertive theatre directors, dance has no lobby. Dance artists are not accustomed to representing their interests. And this is not be cause they generally use their bodies instead of words or because the majority of them are for eigners and didn’t learn German as native speak ers. It’s because there’s no one who represents their interests in committees and lobbies for more money when funding is distributed. There are mainly choreographers, dance companies and occasionally dance dramaturges, all of whom have their hands full with artistic work. Ideally, they’d need a dance director or dance managing director to be in charge of funding acquisition. Like in Berlin where Christiane Theobald, the current managing director and representative of Vladimir Malakhov, played an integral role in putting the Staatsballett Ber lin on sound financial footing, thereby ensur ing its artistic autonomy.

Kohse: Where should we begin in order to im prove the situation?

Völckers: Municipalities are essentially responsi ble for their theatres. The head of cultural af fairs in one city can have quite an impact, as we’ve seen in the past. I’m thinking of Hilmar Hoffmann whose massive support of the head dramaturge Klaus Zehelein in the mid-1980s attracted William Forsythe to Frankfurt. He stood firm by his decision, though subscrip tions were cancelled and the opera played to al most empty houses in the beginning. He was convinced that Forsythe was the best, and there fore, the ideal choice for his city. Eventually, Forsythe’s international acclaim proved him right. It was similar with Pina Bausch in Wup pertal ten years earlier.

On the whole, it takes massive pressure from au diences to make theatre budge an inch for the sake of dance. And the dance community has to become active to create this pressure. The dance artists, too, have to be stronger and force them selves to raise their voices. The performances have to have better quality, attract larger audi ences and receive much more attention from the press. The cultural section in newspapers hardly contains any features on dance.

Kohse: Which we cannot only attribute to the editors’ ignorance, but also the truly difficult task of writing about dance in such a way that interests a large portion of the readership.

Völckers: Writing about music is also difficult, but no one has to justify it! Because in our society, music in contrast to dance is regard ed as an educational asset. Almost everyone has a musical style they grew up and can whistle its melodies. This is the kind of literacy that dance should also aim to achieve. And it won’t be easy because there is hardly a repertory which one can learn. In ballet, yes. But not in modern dance works. And definitely not in Germany. There’s no Wigman here that you can see, no Limón, no Cunningham nothing from which ultimately everything in this area origi nates. And the problem is far more serious for dancers than for the viewers. That’s why improv ing dance literacy in Germany is an extremely urgent issue.

Kohse: There are musical scores for classical bal let. Why not modern dance? Are the choreogra phies so specific to certain companies that the works can no longer be interpreted differently when removed from the artists?

Völckers: I don’t know why so little is passed on to other dancers. Pina Bausch always wanted to have her works performed by her own dancers with the exception of two pieces she developed for the opera in Paris. Anne Teresa De Keers maeker doesn’t give anything away, either. The same goes for Meg Stuart…

William Forsythe, on the other hand, is current ly developing a system of dance notation to al low other choreographers to stage an existing choreography. In a pilot project titled Syn chronous Objects , he recorded his com pany’s performance of One Flat Thing , reproduced from 2000 with multiple cam eras from various angles. As each dancer is marked with a specific colour, the lines of move ment are precisely depicted on film, creating a complex, but understandable portrayal of the performance. Other choreographers can make practical use of this system of notation for their own works as well. The goal is to create a digital archive or Motion Bank

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an interview with hortensia völckers on the need for dance literacy

Forsythe wants to preserve his other works in the same way, so that young dancers and future audiences can access them in the future. In this way, they’ll know what they have to be aware of, and not always leave the performances, saying »I don’t know what really happened in there.«

Kohse: But even if we know what we must be aware of does that mean we really understand the work better? Do we know what it’s about? Völckers: When you listen to a piece by Luigi No no, do you necessarily know what it’s about? Feelings and associations are the first things that take shape when we perceive abstract art! Modern dance, on the other hand, actually pos sesses a rich history of very concrete social refer ences. It started with the female dancers at the beginning of the 20th century who took off their ballet outfits, danced barefoot and expressed a feeling of life through the feeling of the body! Independent women like Isadora Duncan also led private lives which were socially unacceptable at the time. She had children out of wed lock and danced in nature wearing transparent clothes! And then came the expressive dances of Mary Wigman these were clearly emotion ally loaded statements the Witch Dance and The Seven Dances of Life In Germany, in particular, theatrical forms have played a larger role in dance. Including the obvi ously politically-oriented choreographies based on Frida Kahlo or Baader-Meinhof by Johann Kresnik. Pina Bausch addressed the role of women, the structure of relationships and the issue of age when she worked with dancers who were over 65 in her piece Kontakthof in 2000 However, the reason why dance remains on the margins of high culture has nothing to do with the inability to communicate through dance, but rather the lack of access to dance. And to make dance more accessible, we not only have to improve the institutions, but also and most importantly at least in my opinion intro duce it to children.

Kohse: Teaching children at school how to un derstand dance?

Völckers: Yes whereby understanding comes with experience. And with experience comes the desire for more later in life. If every child in Berlin gained enough experience with dance and movement so that they could build a natu ral relationship to the genre, they would also watch dance as adults and bring up their chil dren in the same way. And that’s how we could integrate this issue into our culture. It doesn’t happen with festivals or newspapers, but only when an entire generation has gained positive experience with it. We can only change things through experience.

Kohse: And it wouldn’t only be beneficial to dance, but to children, as well.

Völckers: Absolutely. I don’t want to instrumen talize dance by saying it would make school children better at maths. But dance and music can help children from different cultural back grounds find common ground with one another more easily than say, reading a work of Schill er together. Not to speak of getting a better sense of their bodies. As we know, our society is fixated on the body we have to be slim, goodlooking…

Kohse: …and we’re totally paralyzed! We try to emulate the images we make for ourselves. And as soon as someone begins moving, we’re em barrassed.

Völckers: That’s about right. We can even observe how ten-year-olds store limitations and general ly negative experiences in their bodies. With adults, it’s especially striking how clearly their posture and gait suggest the baggage they carry around with them. And they’d rather not show their bodies at all, if possible. Small children dance without inhibition but as soon as they realize that it might make them look ridiculous, they stop. And I believe, if we guided them to dance at an early stage, children would like their bodies more. If our experience with the body is positively influenced, we can appear more selfconfident in any situation.

Kohse: Dance in school doesn’t Berlin have that already? Perhaps not as a subject in itself, but as workshops for school children, offered by choreographers?

Völckers: Yes, that’s the TanzZeit project, ini tiated by the dancer Livia Patrizi in 2005, which has proved extremely successful. Looking back at the past decades, very little has happened in Germany on the whole. For the simple reason that the dance field has hardly any infrastruc ture to speak of. There’s also no regular dance training at the university level as there is for music, for example. Of course, there are ballet schools. But we’re not talking about the dance en pointe. We’re talking about having a sufficient number of dance educators who regularly teach sequences of movement at schools and can initi ate an aesthetic discussion about them, as well. We have to create a system of distribution that provides comprehensive coverage to all schools. The Dance Plan in Munich is working on it, the Berliners have established a rather good programme thanks to TanzZeit , the work in Düsseldorf has been intensified through the Dance Plan , and in Frankfurt/Main, they are just starting out. Of course, each city has its own method. However, an association has just been established the National Association

of Dance in Schools which will serve as their network and represent their interests. And now the goal is to develop curricula, start pilot projects, introduce new degree programmes at uni versities…

Kohse: …which the Dance Plan in Frankfurt has already achieved, for example!

Völckers: When the Federal Cultural Foundation started the Dance Plan Germany , went to the cities and told them we’d give them money if they could raise the same amount to jointly get something off the ground that would help dance on the whole, the first things they created were local educational programmes. For danc ers in Berlin, where an interdisciplinary univer sity dance centre was established at the Univer sity of the Arts. Or in Dresden where the Palucca School, the Semperoper ballet and the Euro pean Centre for the Arts Hellerau collaborated to get young dancers working with experi enced choreographers. In Potsdam and Ham burg, choreographer-in-residence programmes were created. As I’ve mentioned before, dance education programmes for school children were developed in Munich and Düsseldorf. And in Frankfurt and Giessen, master’s degree pro grammes in Dance Education, Choreography and Performance were introduced. Dance schol ars are developing new teaching models in Essen, and in Bremen, the North German Dance Conference invited numerous dance companies in the municipal and state theatres to network with one another.

Kohse: What will happen to all these projects when the Foundation’s funding programmes wind down at the end of next year?

Völckers: The dance artists in the Dance Plan cities have already begun lobbying. They’ve learned that they’re capable of achieving their goals and obtaining financing when they work together. When we step back, we’ll see how and to what extent they’ll make use of these skills. If it all dissipates, then we have no choice but to admit that the measures failed. But if something remains or something new develops from them, then we can say they were successful.

Kohse: So after this period of intensive impetus and development, the Federal Cultural Founda tion is leaving dance to fend for itself on the free municipal subsidy market?

Völckers: Not entirely. I’ve gotten the impression that our trustees and board members have be come more accustomed to the idea that we have to promote dance. But nevertheless, I’d like to consolidate dance to such an extent that there’s no going back. Establishing a network, as the Dance Plan has, represents an important step in this direction. Furthermore, it’s obvi ously very important to support the independ ent scenes, because we need their artistic impuls es. We’re still doing too little in this area, per haps because we in Germany have a well-func tioning institutional infrastructure in compari son to other nations. In addition to the dance ensembles at theatres, there is a large pool of artists who wish to work freelance, but require reliable financing nonetheless.

Kohse: Are there any dance institutions in other countries which you find exemplary?

Völckers: The ballet at the Paris Opera is sensa tional. They have the Corps de Ballet with over 150 dancers in a venue of their own the Palais Garnier. The director Brigitte Lefèvre has culti vated the enormously large cultural heritage of dance and developed a kind of repertory. At the same time, she invites contemporary pioneers like Jerôme Bel, Merce Cunningham and Sasha Waltz, all of whom have developed choreogra phies for the ensemble. This means they have a sufficient number of artists, because they spe

cialize in entirely different movements and styles. In Paris, you can view all of dance history, from the past to the present; it is like strolling through a museum. There’s also the Centre Nationale de la Danse , the main contact for all matters in dance, and the decentralized Centres Choréographiques . It’s just fantastic.

Kohse: Is this what you mean when you say you’d like to consolidate dance?

Völckers: I cannot yet say whether what we’re de veloping for dance right now will be what we should invest in over the long term. What I can say is that our work will focus more on the art, on the history of dance and its repertory. We should never forget our traditions! And I also think it’s regrettable that the areas of ballet and New Dance are so institutionally separated. In my opinion, cultural policymakers should work in a meaningful way to create connections be tween the two.

Kohse: The Dance Plan has already set the stage for this with the Dance Education

Biennial Völckers: Yes, it was really difficult to get the uni versity biennial off the ground! But last year, the graduating classes of all ten dance schools in Germany finally got together in Ber lin. And these ten schools are very different, ranging from the most gruelling ballet training in Munich to the complete openness of the new degree programme at the University of the Arts.

And for several days, all these young dancers, who would soon be entering the German dance market, met, talked about dance and performed together. Marvellous! Next year, the biennial will take place in Essen.

And then there’s the Dance Plan project that will virtually combine all the dance archives in to one. There’s the second Dance Congress coming up the first of which we organized ourselves which continues the tradition of the historic dancer congresses of the 1920s and early 30s. And there’s the transition study which examines how dancers can enter new oc cupations at the end of their dancing career.

Kohse: I can see you’re sorry that the Dance Plan is coming to an end.

Völckers: Yes! It will mean one less support centre for dance. Many people who want to learn something about dance in Germany call up the Dance Plan first. It collects a wide range of information, provides funding, offers small scholarships, etcetera. It’s really too bad that it’s ending. But, unfortunately, the Federal Cultur al Foundation is not a national dance agency.

Kohse: And where would you say German dance is positioned internationally?

Völckers: Right at the top. It has a strong expressive dance tradition. And just ask the Goethe-Institut and they’ll tell you that Pina Bausch, William Forsythe, who works in Germany and whom I consider German now, and Sasha Waltz are truly successful exports. Everyone wants to see their works. And in a globalised world, dance is the form of expression par excellence as local and international influences combine in innovative ways which will benefit everyone in the future. If dance artists took this to heart once and for all, they’d be much more self-confident.

current dance projects

dance congress 2009 No Step without Movement! is the motto of the Dance Congress 2009 which will take place at Kampnagel in Hamburg from 5 to 8 November. This year’s congress will examine current issues concern ing the state of contemporary dance. For example, how can we improve the production conditions, funding structures and marketing strategies for dance in the long term? How can we more strongly anchor dance in our edu cational canon and research efforts? How is dance history being written to day and what will dance archives look like in the future? An event funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation in cooperation with Kampnagel, K3 — Centre for Choreography Dance Plan Hamburg and the Centre for Performance Studies at the University of Hamburg. Supported in part by the Hamburg State Ministry for Culture, Sports and Media and the German Research Foundation ( DFG ). www.tanzkongress.de

choreographing you Art and dance of the last 50 years Choreograph ing You is the first exhibition that examines the interplay between art and dance in terms of choreography – of inventing and shaping motion. The cho reographic concept is to make the visitors’ motions an intrinsic component of the works, without which their intention could not be realized. The exhibition will display a wide range of works, beginning with Bruce Nauman’s corridor pieces from the 1960s to recent works like Scattered Crowd (2002) by William Forsythe. Artistic directors: Stephanie Rosenthal, Nicky Molloy, André Lepecki FR / Artists: Jerôme Bel FR , Pablo Bronstein UK , Trisha Brown US ), Alain Buffard, Rosemary Butcher UK , Boris Charmatz ( FR , Gustovo Ciriacs, Marie Cool FR ) and Fabio Balducci I , Vincent Du pont, William Forsythe US , Simone Forti US ), Allan Kaprow US ), Latifa Laâbissi FR ), Thomas Leh men, Marcela Levi BR , Kate Mcintosh ( NZ , Ohad Meromi IL , Mathilde Monnier FR , Robert Morris ( US , Jennifer Nelson US , Miguel Pereira AR ), Robin Rhode ZA , Xavier le Roy FR , Peter Welz, Franz West AT / Kunsthalle Hamburg, starts May 2010 followed by an exhibition at The Hayward, Southbank Center, London GB www.haywardgallery.org.uk

oedipus rex International dance project With her upcoming production of the operatic oratory Oedipe Roi by Igor Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau, the Argentinean Constanza Macras ventures into new artistic territory. In her version of this modern classic, Macras will apply tools of modern dance thea tre while retaining the original principles of the piece, i.e., rejection of stage realism and psychological interpretation. Oedipus Rex is a co-production by the European Center for the Arts in Hellerau, the Teatro Comunale di Ferrara and the MESS Sarajevo festival. Artistic director: Constanza Macras AR / Musical direc tor: Max Renne JP Dance: Chiharua Shiota JP ) / 19 21 Nov. 2009 European Center for the Arts, Hellerau, Dresden www.dorkypark.org

le bal. allemagne A German-German history

This dance theatre project adapts an idea first dramatized in the now legendary theatre piece Le Bal des Théâtre du Campagnol from the 1980s. Arranged in chronological order, the episodic scenes feature people in a ballroom, each of whom represent a different generation as expressed by their personal stories, their clothing and the music, to which they dance. The original French version has been in ternationally adapted many times. This new adaptation by Nurkan Erpulat and Tunçay Kulaog˘lu will present the complete German history on stage, starting from the early post-war years of German division to the Peaceful Revolution of 1989 Artistic director: Shermin Langhoff / Director: Nurkan Erpulat TR / Composer: Enis Rotthoff / Author/dramaturge: Tunçay Kulaog˘lu ( TR / 1 30 Mar. 2010, Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin www.ballhausnaunynstrasse.de

colombia festival Theatre festival and lectures In 2010, when the next presidential election coincides with the 200th anniversary of the country’s declaration of independence, Colombians will surely make world headlines as they take to the streets to celebrate and protest. To mark this occasion, the Theater Hebbel am Ufer has asked Colombian artists whether they see any reason to celebrate. Two dance companies and three theatre groups will increase public awareness with performances that reflect the perspec tive of artists who critically view the socio-political reality of their country and articulate the hopes and fears of its inhabitants. Artistic directors: Gustavo Liano CO ) , Kirsten Hehmeyer / Artists: Manuel Orjuela Cortés CO ), Rolf & Heidi Abderhalden CO , Tino Fernandez CO ) and others / 19 Apr.– 2 May 2010, Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin www.hebbel-am-ufer.de

choreographic captures 2009 2011 Combining choreography with art films in commercial clips In 2008 an international competition called on choreographers, film and media artists to submit Choreographic Cap tures – a new short film format that explores various forms of representation and realization of choreography and art film. The project Choreographic Captures 2009 2011 will continue developing this successful prototype for three more years. In addition to holding an annual professional competition, the project’s website will be expanded into a multilingual, interactive platform for choreographic short films from around the world. Artistic director: Walter Heun / Jury members: Andreas Ströhl, Thierry de Mey B , Frédéric Mazelly F / Film screenings throughout Europe and interactive online presentation, 16 June 2009 –Nov. 2011 www.choreographiccaptures.org

Hortensia Völckers is the Artistic Director of the Federal Cultural Foundation. She was interviewed by the journalist Petra Kohse

1 Mary Wigman in Witch Dance 1926, photo: Charlotte Rudolph. VG -Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009 [C] 2 Anna Pavlova in The Dying Swan , 1928, photo: Franz von Riel [C] 3 Daisy Spies in The Triadic Ballet by Oskar Schlemmer (spiral), Donaueschingen 1926, photo: Grill [C] 4 Vaclav Nijinsky in Till Eulenspiegel , undated, photo: Max Erlanger de Rosen [C] 5 Dance on points »conquers« the kitchen…, undated, photo: Limot [C] 6 Josephine Baker, undated, photographer un known [C] 7 Olga Preobrajenska, undated, photographer unknown [C] 8 Anita Berber, undated, photographer unknown [C]

1 The Jivers 1984, photo: Gabriel Weismann [C] 2 Break Dancer, undated, photographer unknown [C]

3 Flamenco Los Molineros, undated, photo: Regina and Angel Martinez [C] 4 no information given [C]

5 Tap Dance, undated, photographer unknown [C] 6 Dorothee Parker and Ramon, undated, photo: Sieg

fried Enkelmann. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009 [C] 7 no information given [C] 8 Harald Horn and Liane Müller, Munich, undated, photo: Siegfried Enkelmann. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009 [C] 9 Tap Dance, un dated, photographer unknown [C] 10 no information given [C] 11 Top-ranking couple in the interna tional professional dance sport. Ralf Lepehne and Lydia Weisser, Bonn, undated, photo: Pressedienst Hölters München [C]

1 Die Pleiße Dohlen in Myrthen , undated, photo: Andreas Birkigt [C]

2 Palucca School in Dresden Gruppen Etüde [Group Etude], un dated, photo: Siegfried Prölß [C] 3 Norman Davis ballet in Sex , Mu

and Hot Nights . Scope-Farbfilmschau. photo: Constantin

ultraslim and supersmar t ?

dance as body, brain and social doping

with all the risks and side effects

After his tragic death, everything was suddenly forgotten. The scandalous escapades faded in the posthumous halo of the iconic entertainer who wrote several legendary songs, catapulted a dozen mega-sellers into the top forty and filled entire stadiums. But above all, he had been a phenomenal performer, a dancing humanoid with breathtaking body control.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. He had tried everything to conquer his body, to wrestle it down and redesign it to an ideal image. Michael Jackson became a victim of that cosmetic eye (Martina Pippal) that keeps correcting nature until there is nothing left. Instead of enhancing, the King of Pop radically erased his background, his original contours, and in the end, himself.

It is quite revealing that Jackson turned out to be a brilliant dancer and that no obituary failed to mention his legendary physical agility. Since dance descended from the divine heights of its sacred past into the low-lands of everyday life and established it self as a majestic nimbus and school of plebeian etiquette, its most elegant business has focussed on controlling human nature (Rudolf zur Lippe). Dancing supposedly make us bet ter people well-mannered, morally decent and of pure mind because it frees our bodies of obscene instincts. This was the teaching of Renaissance-period dance masters, and despite libidinous temptations, we have proven to be worthy followers of this line of thought today. According to a long-held belief, those who dance keep in shape, stay healthy, are more intelligent (as their motor skills are better trained) and are more socially com patible (as they are community-tested).

This would give us reason to be happy if it weren’t for the dance elite who know more about dance because it’s either their profes sion or they deal with it on a professional basis. This group has no desire to sing the praises of dance in unison along with brain researchers, body sociologists, educational scientists and social pedagogues. Some have expressed a suspicion that dance is being exploited, crossing the fine line between art and commerce, as if they fear their own dethronement. Those who work with amateurs, whether they be school classes, patients of dance ther apy or tango fanatics, are clearly in the second row, far behind the artists and their PR agents who insist on the autonomy of dance art. Apart from a handful of ballet companies in Germany which work with amateurs in theatre and adventure-based educational projects, most of the dance scene has reacted to this trend with capricious mistrust.

This insistence on professionalism is a symptom of weakness.

On one hand, it reveals that the self-regard of dance artists re mains underdeveloped, and on the other, indicates long-term damaging professional blindness. If we take a look at dance train ing schools and their graduates, we discover that most of Europe, half of America and Asia are churning out more young

dancers than Germany. This is not something to lose sleep over, but it does speak volumes about the fact that dance in Germany, like classical and music theatre have made great strides toward becoming recognized independent genres, but are far from achieving equality with their sister arts.

The dance community has remained relatively small due in part to its exclusive airs. Apparently word has not yet gotten out that the performing arts rely on an expert audience, one familiar with its codes and traditions. While most in school have learned about Goethe, Schiller, Benn and Beethoven, only the inner circle grosso modo are familiar with Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, Vaslav Nijinsky and George Balanchine. This is surprising as dance has been a part of the educational canon for centuries. The courtiers of Versailles were as familiar with dance as the German bourgeois of the 19th century. Furthermore, ballet and ballroom dance grew from the same abso lutistic roots and were closely related for a long time in terms of their language of movement. People who witnessed a spectacle dansé 150 years ago were usually able to figure out its structure through experience alone future housewives were required to study simple pirouettes along with piano playing, and their spouses were not only expected to demonstrate academic and business prowess, but had to fence in duel for their honour and dance in the ballroom for their reputation.

Thank God this fortress of education has fallen. Thank God, be cause it represented the desire for distinction in an aristocratic social architecture which extended the class-conscious bourgeoi sie for its own benefit. Secondly, it reduced dance to one particu lar aspect its social-technological value. Everyone’s personali ty underwent development that was forced to adapt to the order of the day, and dance played a particularly important role as it promised to tame the one anarchical element in society, namely the human body.

This is where contemporary critics deliver their strongest argu ment against expanding the dance zone. Forcing the dancing individual into a social corset would be a triumph of social doping over the aura of art dance reduced to an educational tool. Its argumentative spirit would be extinguished and its independent mission within the matrix of economy, power and culture (Max Weber) would be diluted so far as to be unrecognizable. Which strategy makes sense then if we wish to avoid making dance a means to an end, yet also expand its field of impact for no other purpose than for the sheer will of self-preservation? Per haps it would be helpful to discuss several working hypotheses based on three examples body, society and education, exam ine the meaning of dance and the questions which we hope dance can answer for us.

The fundamental phenomenon which dance has always dealt with is the human body. Beyond the temple districts of antiqui-

ty, dance has always been about the art of discipline, inserting oneself into pre-determined, choreographed forms. Since the absolutistic pomp fizzled, Die Arbeit am eigenen Körper [Working on One’s Body] (Martina Pippal/Bernadette Wegenstein) has become increasingly significant, and Projekt Körper [The Body Project] (Waltraud Posch) has made the present day a maxim for everyone. Whoever is self-confident, takes cares of his appearance and assesses himself in anticipation of how one’s environment will judge him. »Self-develop ment is a must« (Posch), yet the inner voice is just one of many. Like on stage, the external view is a decisive factor that deter mines the success or failure of one’s (self) presentation.

Unlike the 18th and 19th century, our view not only scans the fa cade, i.e., one’s clothing and behaviour, but focuses on the body itself. The beauty cult has created an ideal which despite sup posed tolerance toward other forms of appearance and lifestyles is strongly judgemental. Those who wish to be successful in social circles should appear slender, agile and seemingly ageless. Indeed, the popular ideal has grown increasingly similar to the requirements that have long been a fact of life for dancers. Forty-year-old performers retire, cellulite in tights is a no-go, and weight problems prematurely end the most promising young ca reers.

In a way, dance is a kind of permissible body doping, but comes with the price of poor visibility natural processes of life, aging, fluctuations and loss of physical strength are simply blocked out. This lack of perspective has become a way of life among professionals and has affected their social disposition. If all you see are very young, attractive people on stage who, in fact, are the product of a selection principle you will eventual ly regard such people as the norm. If dance truly wants to avoid being exploited, come across as subversive and overturn aesthet ic conventions, it will also have to be put to the test for better or worse. Is it true that dancers always have to be young and flawlessly beautiful, or could it be that with age they find new ways of expressing themselves, and that by distancing ourselves from the athletic type, we might discover untapped creative po tential?

Dancers like the hunchbacked Raimund Hoghe, whose appear ance starkly contrasts the mainstream, shows us that dance, like all art forms, does not strive to be mainstream, but to be unique, to break with the conventions of perception and rattle our usual viewing patterns. As far as the issue of age is concerned, the discontinuation of a company that consciously worked with dancers over forty namely Jirˇí Kylián’s Nederlands Dans Theater III sheds a revealing light on the dance scene. Instead of taking advantage of the life and performance experience of older dancers, the scene recycles them after a short time, and thus, pays tribute to the ever-spreading post-industrial

mania of replacing older employees with younger ones. What’s possible in art can’t be wrong in business. A more critical reflec tion on its actions and usual market mechanisms would do dance more good than simply allowing its well-oiled machinery to con tinue running as usual.

For the body, dancing is certainly one of the most recommended activities (as long as one doesn’t push oneself to top perform ances levels, which requires absolute caution to prevent injury). Dance strengthens the muscular and cardiovascular systems, en hances one’s state of mind and coordination, and provides ex pression to the joy of moving. This was common knowledge to the ancient Greeks, and modern-day writers haven’t grown tired of disseminating this knowledge among the reading public. However, this does not necessarily refer to a person’s body as such, but rather the socially and economically adaptable body apparatus. Its applicability remains the measure of all things. However, dancing as a way of consciously controlling one’s body which modern-day discourse describes as authenticity was not intended in this scenario.

The Swiss journalist Christina Thurner recently argued that the pressure for dance to adapt was lifted for only one moment in dance history at the dawn of classicism. Everything that hap pened before and after referred to an ideal, influenced by the im age of the social formation of the time. It was never the emanci pation or delimitation of the ego, but rather the restraint of in stinct, the aspiration to achieve and self-control that have always advanced the process of civilization.

This trinity is what makes the dancing body so unique and seductive be it at the theatre or disco and when bundled, forms the noble contrast to sex, drugs and Rock’n’Roll. One stays clean regardless of how lasciviously one dances. It’s like adminis tering clinically pure social doping, so to speak. The paramount example of such a dancer is none other than Michael Jackson. No matter how many times the moonwalker grabbed his crotch and loaded every gesture with predatory eroticism, his entire ap pearance remained nonetheless asexual and aseptic, and in the end, cannibalized his flesh. For as Jackson dissected his every movement into its individual parts on stage, he dissected himself behind the scenes, patched up a new silhouette of himself with

the help of plastic charlatans until he had deformed his appearance to such a degree he could finally recognize himself.

Jackson created himself a truly self-made man and dance became a language that in many ways communicated the same message: Noli me tangere. He drove the human aspect out of his dancing and simultaneously raised his body to superhu man-unhuman heights, making himself, in effect, untouchable. This steely untouchability, protected by the armour of his sin ewy-looking costumes, illustrates the risks and side effects of the health and self-realization ideology of modern times. Where na ture fails to deliver, the pharmaceutical industry and celebrity surgeons are ready to step into the breach. After all, nothing is more valuable than body capital which is the starting point of »passionate self-modelling« (Posch) along the lines of »show me your body and how it moves, and I’ll tell you who you are!« This representative sell-off contradicts the dignity of every art and therefore, collides with how dance sees itself. But how can it counter this? First, by critically examining its own capitalizing tendencies and turbo maximization, or in other words, its fascination with physical feats and intoxicating speed. In terms of technique, timing and precision, contemporary dance has reached a level that simply overwhelms us. But no longer pro vokes us. What we see astonishes us to the utmost, although or perhaps because we can keep it a safe distance away from us. It’s not without reason that the person who significantly influenced this development has meanwhile slammed the brakes. William Forsythe, the doyen of postmodern dance, has turned away from the expansion of the body cult. Instead of endlessly increasing his arsenal of the arabesque, he arranges splinters of thought in succession which fill themselves with fibres of movement and not the other way around. The effect is that, beyond biomechanical virtuosity, we witness the sudden spark of humanity and not in an anecdotal sense, but rather an anthropological sense. This metamorphosis is a result of what we can briefly sum up as critical awareness and aesthetic education. In current education al debates, dance has begun to play an increasingly important role as a community-builder and neuro-activator. According to human scientific research, every rhythmic movement helps cali brate the mind, and dance classes in school help invoke team spirit which later keeps the economic wheel rolling. Despite the

fact that cost-benefit calculations are being used here as if to say, the school administration will only pay for what is useful the dance world should ask itself what role it can play in educa tion and the community. And even this isn’t enough to turn things around.

If it’s true that motor skill is pure brain doping, then young future dancers are true wunderkinder. The dance profession hardly takes advantage of this fact, however, and has failed to provide sufficient general education or professional opportunities out side its scope of activity for dancers before or after their career. This constriction, which is often concealed by the cute euphe mism not a profession, but a calling, takes its revenge both on the individual and the image of the entire branch. Those, who believe they are called to the dance profession, need not care an iota about their reputation. And so they keep company among themselves in a dreamy hortus conclusus of art.

This is fine for as long as times are idyllic and no clouds of crisis darken the horizon. As soon as the vultures start circling above the empty municipal coffers, the first thing they devour as we’ve seen in past decades is dance, which is and has always been the weakest link in the German theatre world. The only way to prevent this is to tear down the picket fence and use the guer rilla tactics of underground networks. Art rebellion or no in stead of dying in beauty, dance will have to join all those who call the tune in the society of knowledge. And by this, I not only refer to the usual suspects, like dance experts, designers and thea tre pedagogues, but also mathematicians, linguists, doctors and biologists who have just begun to recognize the knowledge con tained within the field of dance. Obviously the sister arts are deeply rooted in the educational terrain, and the only way for dance to catch up is to put down new roots over a wide area. Sec ondly, dance must go hunting outside its back yard and pounce on every aesthetic and existential issue that is crucial to society. Exclusion, migration, the demographic pyramid, environmental collapse and the digital revolution those who prefer their peaceful slumber will probably fall into a coma and end up like Michael Jackson a zombie with ultraslim legs.

Dorion Weickmann , author and journalist, wrote her doctorate on the cultural history of dance between the 16th and 19th century. She lives with her family in Berlin.

nomadic dance

moving between the cultures

by gabriele brandstetter

the universal language of dance?

We’ve long become accustomed to those annual festivals which present the newest productions by dance companies around the world to enthusiastic audiences. Dance and performances seem to have effortlessly embraced the role of the ambassador moving across boundaries in a globalised festival culture. They receive sup port from national cultural institutes, like the Goethe-Institut. This has more to do with the fact that promoting dance performances in co operation and exchange is much easier than learning a foreign language. Does this mean that dance is a language we understand no matter where it comes from? The tendency to regard dance as a universal language is old and has been supported by philosophical and anthro pological arguments in writings since the 18th century. But wait until a European audience watches a performance of a traditional Japanese Nô dance, and it’s suddenly obvious that the movement and gestures of the body are any thing but universally interpreted and under stood. We have nothing to gain by simply trans ferring the patterns of perception from our dance culture onto another. Perhaps what is most enriching and challenging is the experi ence of difference in our encounter with other dance cultures. Dance, in its diversity, embod ies the knowledge of a culture in a specific way non-verbally as a movement of the body that shapes space and time artistic or sacred, ritu alistic or athletic, soloistic or collective. Dance alters its form during the process of cultural transfer, in that it practically and literally crosses borders.

Pina Bausch, whose productions with the Tanz theater Wuppertal toured countless cities and festivals worldwide, had always played on her experiences with other cultures and incorporat ed them into her choreography, for example, the melancholy the saudade of Fado, the ges ture of the embrace in tango, or the atmosphere of southern Italy in Palermo , Palermo Conversely, the older dancers in Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof remarked at how differently audiences from other countries reacted to the performances. »What makes the French, Dutch or Italians laugh, what touches them or how they show their joy« is not the same.

Because dance performances are not based on universal forms, but are transported by histori cal and culturally specific local attitudes concerning the body, interaction and rhythmic move

ment, they have the potential for transforma tion. It’s also true that globalisation promotes processes of interactive metamorphosis, result ing in more and more dance hybrids which incor porate the movement and performance tradi tions of different cultural contexts. A tango is a tango, but in Helsinki it’s a slightly different tango than in Buenos Aires. The same, but dif ferent.

Such hybridisations are not merely the result of more recent economic, touristic or media-based networks in our global village. We can find ex amples of interweaving in early colonization movements, such as the integration of exotic Asian trends in European dance around 1900, and most recently, the body techniques of mar tial arts in contemporary Western dance. Trans fer also occurs in the other direction; the trans formation of German expressive dance influ enced the development of the Japanese Butoh dance theatre. Dance is a nomad that leaves a trail which others follow or brush away.

dance is a nomad

Its nomadic migration in Europe was already underway during the Renaissance when the basse danse, which had been circulating among the royal courts of northern Italy and Burgundy, became more refined and its expressive forms more sophisticated, after which time it moved on to England. Dances like the allemande, for example, with a name that reveals its national provenance, changed in its new environments and spawned regionally specific performance methods and dance forms. The discourse re garding the foreign and the familiar, hybridisation and globalisation, doesn’t fully apply here because it remains rooted in the ques tion of origin and authenticity, and disregards its own complexities. Dance would have never developed its nomadic character if ballet mas ters, choreographers and dancers hadn’t been willing or naturally inclined to lead a nomadic life. Looking back at history, it was perhaps co incidence or even necessity that caused dance the art of movement to move ever further outward, crossing territorial, cultural, artistic and social boundaries. Jean Georges Noverre, one of the founders of dramatic dance in the 18th century, worked as a choreographer and in structor in Lyon, Stuttgart, Vienna, Paris and St. Petersburg. Carlo Blasis, the inventor of today’s dance system of (classical) ballet, travelled back

and forth between Milan and London. And Marius Petipa, the choreographer of such clas sics as Swan Lake and Nutcracker , left the Opéra in Paris to work at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. And the dance star Fanny Elssler performed at all the major thea tres in Europe and went on tour through Ameri ca in the first half of the 19th century. Although that was quite exceptional, travelling was a ne cessity and fact of life for most dancers in the 20th century. The nomadic life, characterized by living and working in foreign places and cultur al environments of one’s own personal choos ing, also came to include the experience of emi gration and exile during the 20th century. The brilliance and aesthetic innovations of dance groups like Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russ es was contrasted by the other group of emi grants, the best dancers and artists of the Mari insky Theater, who were forced to cut off all ties with their home country, and discovered (or in vented) the familiar on the stages of the world in never-ending tours and guest performances. We notice the nomadic aspect of dance in its continual movement between local and cultur al spaces. Yet its transformational potential is also evident in its movement between social classes and spheres. It is capable of shaking up socially divided areas and erasing the divi sions that separate the generations. For example, in response to an aging society, opinion poll sters, economists, insurance experts and politi cians address the problem of generational fairness with appeals for solidarity. And then there are those well-meant events for senior citizens and youth clubs which actually do more to contribute to than dismantle generational segregation in society. But certain forms of dance, such as the popular dance tango or Pina Bausch’s choreographed performance of Kon takthof , have demonstrated a different, re laxed and fun way to get the young and old to interact. Dance offers us an alternative the possibility of encounter without the hierar chism and discrimination of social measures.

dancing together kontakthof

The huge, long-lasting success of Kontakthof can be attributed to the fact that this con vincing artistic event shows us something that could never happen in normal life. Developed in 1978, the choreography premiered in 2000 and continued running for several years on tour

in a version with amateur dancers over 65. Ac cording to Bausch, it was her wish to entrust older women and men with a great deal of life experience with such a theme. And what is the theme? Kontakthof is a place of encounter, »where people meet to find con tact. To show themselves, to refuse each other. With fears. With desires, disappointments. Frustration. First experiences. First tries. Tender moments and what can come of them.« This is how Pina Bausch described the theme in her own words. And in 2008, thirty years after its inception, she introduced a new version of Kon takthof with teenagers over 14. The piece, the scenes and the composition are all the same, but change as it crosses the generations, because young and old have very different experiences to communicate. The piece is primarily about dealing with the possibilities and limits of one’s body which the dancers experience and experi ment with, in joint effort, in moving dialogue with others and in the encounter with one’s de sires mirrored by others. A process that is both frustrating and comical, tedious and delightful. A piece like Kontakthof is capable of heightening our awareness that it’s possible to find other categories of beauty and agility not the show of mastery, not the perfectly sculpted bodies with their promise of age lessness, not the corrective surgery or phar maceutical optimisation. Contrary to politics and society, it doesn’t promote the concept of compensation or sharing the burden equally among the generations, but rather acceptance and the lightness of being with no age limit.

tango as a way of life

You could perform Kontakthof all night long, Pina Bausch said shortly after it premiered. In the same way Kontakthof established its success as a spectacular evening performance, tango is celebrated as a popular way of life. Tan go dance evenings, called milongas, seldom be gin in Buenos Aires before midnight and last until 4 am all night long, couples mov ing together in close embrace. In the wood-pan elled, decadent rooms of the Confíteria Ideal under golden chandeliers, or in the base ment of La Viruta where beginners and ad vanced dancers intermingle, or in the gymnasi um-like Sunderland club where long-time milongueros celebrate the traditional tango, it’s amazing how tango has established itself as a

place of contact for both young and old, accept ed by 20 -year-olds and octogenarians alike. At the Baile de Campeones tango competi tion at Salón Canning, a young couple, slender and taut, step onto the dance floor. The woman, like many female tango dancers, is clearly trained in ballet. It is a pleasure to watch the cou ple dance, aesthetically, musically with sweep ing figures and flourishes. They are followed by a couple, both of whom are well over seventy and more corpulent. The moment they take their position in the tango embrace and find their rhythm together, one immediately senses an extreme intensity that lasts the whole three minutes of the dance dancing for personal and mutual pleasure nothing spectacular, no prepared choreography in their sequence of steps, just a simple connection to one another, united and absorbed in the music. Tango is a dance of endless and unpredictable possibilities an improvised dance, the form of which is determined by the couple’s combination and sequence of steps at the moment they begin dancing, and then evolves further according to their needs and possibilities. This unpredictabil ity is what makes tango so fascinating. And the intimacy of the bodies in embrace makes it a dance of the heart.

Not only does the emotional aspect of touch in tango create a connection between generations and social cultures. »Tango is a hybrid dance for a hybrid mass of people,« explains the Argen tinean researcher Horacio Salas. Historically speaking, this popular dance was an amalgam of different forms of music and movements from various European, African and South Ameri can cultures which the immigrants in the Rio de la Plata region combined at the end of the 19th century. Its nomadic heritage enabled tango to transform, yet preserve its identity as it mi grated from Buenos Aires to the major cities of the world and back again.

Enrique Santos Discépolo, one of the most influential tango poets, once said that tango comes from the street. That was why he liked to walk the streets of Buenos Aires and listen to the soul of the city. This is also a journey through the urban spaces of loneliness, feeling uprooted, saying goodbye, the struggle, the end of love, all of which is expressed in tango.

Tango is a memory bank of feelings and experi ences which model social reality in a very spe cific way. It can offer traditional gender roles a

new way of understanding the concept of lead ing and following. Or it can be the joy of experimenting in Tango Nuevo, or the fascina tion with the unconventional ZEN Tango, or perhaps the Contact Tango which brings the in compatible together. These transformations are made possible through the use of tango’s cul tural characteristics, which, in view of cultural differences, become all the clearer. Because tan go is more than merely an artistic sequence of steps and can only be tango when it conveys the feelings and experiences of life, it takes on a unique appearance when danced in Berlin, in New York, Tokyo or Helsinki. In Wuppertal with Pina Bausch, it’s perhaps at its most unem bellished.

»what are the benefits of tango?«

In her piece Bandoneón , which premiered after the Tanztheater Wuppertal completed a South American tour, Pina Bausch transferred the atmosphere of tango into the scenarios of her choreographic work based on the questions: »What are the benefits of tango?« and »At what point can we begin dancing it?« In the latter, she wasn’t referring to the prescribed steps and forms of a dance, but rather those inexplicable moments when movements take shape and tell us something about people’s feelings. Return ing from the tour with a myriad of new impres sions, Raimund Hoghe (dramaturge under Pina Bausch at the time) remembered how some thing had broken open and become uncertain with regard to one’s dreams and reality in life. In this sense, tango was not the theme, but the impetus for examining what is foreign and strange in one’s own life. Not a single tango is danced in Bandoneón in order to respect the special character of the other culture and to avoid the cliché of performing exotic pseudo tangos which could become the dance hits of the piece. Instead, the piece featured tango music from the era of Carlos Gardel, played by a live band, and the melancholy sound of the bandoneón an instrument, invented by a German, which found its purpose and meaning in life in Argentinean tango.

Pina Bausch’s choreography makes tango the medium. It examines the rituals of closeness and distance and searches for those moments when habitual posing ceases and a feeling of to getherness arises scenes in which the dancers

simply stand in position to tango, or wait an en tire tango before reading a poem aloud to the audience. Or a »tango« in altered poses which also reveal pain and inadequacy, for example, when couples meet in a tango embrace, but shuf fle across the floor on their knees. In the back ground, the male dancer Dominique Mercy, dressed in a ballerina tutu, executes perfect pliés (knee bends) over and over. Images of the loneliness of dance training and the difficulties for a couple to move together in unison blend to gether and create an overlap of two dance cul tures ballet and tango. »What are the benefits of tango?« Pina Bausch’s dance theatre and tan go as a popular dance form show us how move ment reacts to cultural and social contexts and simultaneously overcomes its reality-forming power. And though it’s the same, it can also be different. A conundrum, if dance were a univer sal language.

Gabriele Brandstetter is a professor of Theatre and Dance Studies at the FU Berlin. Her research activities focus on the theory of performance, body and movement concepts in writing, images and performance, and investiga tion of dance, theatricality, and gender difference. In 2004 she was awarded the prestigious Gottfried-WilhelmLeibniz-Preis by the German Research Foundation ( DFG ). In 2005 Gabriele Brandstetter founded the Centre for Movement Research at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her most recent publications as co-editor include: Szenen des Vorhangs Schnittflächen der Künste , Rombach Scenae, Freiburg 2008 and Prognosen über Bewe gungen , b_books, Berlin 2009

1 Scene from the film Was ist los mit Nanette , photographer unknown [C] 2 Revue scene, undated, pho to: Walery, Paris [C] 3 Bonjour Paris, undated, photo: Mistinguette Film [C] 4 700 th anniversary of Berlin. Au gust 1937, photographer unknown [C] 5 Olympic games in Berlin 1936, photographer unknown [C] 6 Festa della legioni in the stadium in Milan, 11 June 1940, photo: Sportbild-Verlag Max Stirner [C]

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previous page Berlin’s highest bar. On the roof of the Eden Hotel, undated, photo: Keystone [C] 1 46th Street Jam from the film Fame 1980, photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [C] 2 Revue scene, un dated, photographer unknown [C] 3 Exercises 1910, photo: Rud. Gentsch [C] 4 Corps de Ballett in »Giselle« by Heinz Spoerli, Basler Theater, photo: Peter Stöckli [C]

a dream come true is it the story

dancing or the stars? the popularity of dance films

Impatiently, I wait for my train at the metro station Platz der Luft brücke in Berlin. My gaze wanders to a gigantic billboard adver tising the musical Dirty Dancing . As I ask myself why I al ways get so annoyed at such revivals, I notice two guys nearby, wearing baseball caps and baggy jeans, passing the time by break dancing. Over and over again, they try to spin off their backs into a handstand. They give each other advice about when to shift their weight so they can hold the handstand longer or how to change their poses more smoothly. »Like, that looks cooler, you know?«

The train finally comes. In every station we enter, I see the same poster for Dirty Dancing blur past my window the 1980s seem to be everywhere, on the radio, in fashion, at theme parties. I’m actually getting used to teenagers revelling in 80’s nostalgia, singing The Time of My Life with glistening eyes, wearing big-hair and giving high-fives, and girls wearing baggy sweat shirts and skirts with leotards. Many of the hits of the 1980s were soundtracks to well-known dance films which teenagers are just as familiar with as the songs, films like Saturday Night Fe ver (1977), Fame (1980 ), Footloose (1984), Flashdance (1983), A Chorus Line (1985) and Dirty Dancing (1987). Two girls, both about thirteen years old, are sitting across from me, talking about Dirty Dancing . They know the film in side and out, and clearly agree that the film is »simply cult«. What makes these dance films so appealing today? Not only are the old dance films incredibly popular as musical revivals; the masses flock to the cinemas to watch big box office hits like Center Stage or Shall We Dance ? Is it the music, is it the dancing, or is it the stars?

Dance has provided new material for the Hollywood dream machine for more than eighty years. With the first tap dance rou tines and their film-screen virtuosos, American musical films were among the most popular Hollywood genres between the 1930s and the 1950s. As they found heaven in Harlem, splashed through the puddles, singing in the rain, or defied gravity as they romantically tap-danced up the walls of their living rooms, Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire were and still are celebrated as the masters of musical films and revues. With humour and charm, they could make an effortless transi tion from dialogue into song, from acting to dancing. The dance scenes, of course, would express the protagonists’ mood and emotional state in the situation.

But in the 1950s, as these dance icons passed away (Robinson †1949 ) or got on in years, the American musical film genre began its decline. What made these films so special and appealing to a wide variety of people was not the story line, but the stars with their inimitable dance styles and their unchallenged virtuosity. In fact, the storylines only provided the frame and pretext for the singing and dance numbers.

With the passing of musical films, the dancing hero withdrew from the silver screen. It took another twenty years for a charm ing, young dancer to finally win the hearts of cinema goers. He didn’t tap dance, but instead swung his hips under the disco

lights of the late 1970s John Travolta. The film Saturday Night Fever literally caused a new dance fever to spread around the world. A new era of musical films began the dance film genre. After Elvis Presley and Rock’n’Roll, the Beatles, flower power and the 68 generation, the young dance hero of the late seventies had also changed with the times. His image was no longer that of the ideal son-in-law à la Gene Kelley, but the un conventional dancer who was determined to follow his own path in life and was not afraid of crossing aesthetic boundaries in dance. By the mid 1980s, the male dancing hero had had his day and was replaced by female protagonists (with the exception of Billy Elliot , of course). It seems women’s liberation also conquered the male bastion of dance films, as female protago nists now rebelled against the norms, took control of their life and pursued their dream of dancing for a living. »First when there’s nothing but a slow glowing dream that your fear seems to hide deep inside your mind. All alone I have cried silent tears full of pride in a world made of steel made of stone.« As Flash dance begins, the camera pans from the working men to one particular welder, who, taking off his helmet, turns out to be a woman. Alex, who would become the prototype of the female dance hero, is first introduced in the spirit of women’s emancipation as a working woman in a purely male domain. The fem inist interpretation becomes a bit messy, however, with regard to Alex’s part-time job as a dancer in a night club. Although she doesn’t strip, she dances for money in front of lusting, voyeuristic men.

Irrespective of their sex, the dream of dancing has been charac terized as an opportunity and purpose in life for all the protago nists of dance films since the 1980s. No matter what the predomi nant dance style happened to be at the time, all the stories gener ally follow a similar pattern. The main characters are frequently members of an underprivileged social class, have conflicts with their parents or teachers, and seem to be on the outside of life looking in. Obsessed with their dream of dancing, they over come their self-doubts thanks to their skills and talent, out-dance the competition, and convince the jury members of dance acad emies and dancing competitions of their merit. Dance films ex pose the changing thoughts and feelings of their protagonists, depict their circumstances in life and document their personal development. And true to Hollywood, love stories always play a part in it all. In the moment of crisis when the protagonist is about to throw in the towel once and for all, the newly-found love interest steps in to encourage the hero to keep fighting. But as soon as this happens, a romantic crisis ensues, which is natu rally resolved in a wonderfully happy ending when the dream of dance and love merge into one.

The perfect Hollywood fairytale but is it also the fulfilment of the American Dream? Yes and no. In American dance films, the hero struggles as a lowly dishwasher, for example, and becomes a nutcracker not a multimillionaire dining on caviar, but a self-confident young adult who has achieved his/her idealistic dream of becoming a professional dancer. Although dance some

by christina deloglu

times appears to be the only escape from social misery, it is never the means to an end for the hero. On the contrary, the dream of dancing, being accepted by a dance academy and danc ing just for the love of it is what motivates the main characters to be rigorously disciplined, overcome stiff competition and con quer their frustration and self-doubts.

Indeed dance films have created a protagonist who almost per fectly combines the fiction and reality of dance and offers an ideal projection surface for teenage desires. Portrayed as outsid ers who lack opportunities, yet morally resist all temptations and flout the competition thanks to their willpower, these underdogs are sure to win the hearts of audiences. The dance moves appear artistic and impressive, and convey the sense that dance is an art that transcends social classes. The aura of its social tran scendence and its high potential for identification with the pro tagonists are probably one of the reasons why dance films are so appealing and popular from a reception-aesthetic perspective. From a technical point of view, the stable narrative of these dance films proves beneficial as it serves as a framework for widely varying dance styles, e.g., disco music ( Saturday Night Fe ver ), salsa ( Salsa & Amor ), merengue ( Mad Hot Ball room ), mambo ( Dirty Dancing ), hip hop ( Save the Last Dance ), ballet (Center Stage ), breakdance ( Break dance — The Film ) and tango ( The Tango Lesson ). Looking back at the 1980s, we recognize that dance films became an established genre. However, it was also a decade when young people were developing and dancing numerous dance styles to specific musical rhythms simultaneously on the streets and in clubs. Films like Footloose and Flashdance are actually valuable historic documents as they show how diverse dance styles were playfully combined, like jazz dance, breakdance, Jackson’s moonwalk, street dance, disco, ballet, twist, Rock’n’Roll, aerobics and even figure skating. Dance is portrayed in film as a form of expression that unites the masses and is able to bridge the gap between subculture and the professional establishment in an entertaining way. We see this in the disco scenes in Satur day Night Fever , or in Flashdance when the examina tion committee starts rocking in their seats as Alex dances, or that big street scene in Fame when all the students of the Dance Academy run out onto Broadway and dance on the streets and on top of cars. With scenes like these, dance films convey a col lective physical feeling which temporarily conceals competitive conflicts or personal and cultural differences. Either they all participate in a choreographed dance as a group or each person dances in their own style to a common musical rhythm. Dance films of the 1980s were all about freedom and participation in the medium of the moving body. As popular dance and popular music merged, dance films and video clips, like Thriller (1982 ), became a (film) genre of their own.

While the protagonists had to outshine the competition in the films of the 1980s, the actors themselves had to fight for these roles by demonstrating essential dance skills. The fact of the mat ter is that the leading characters can only dance as well as the ac tors who play them. Thanks to technological innovations since

the

the 1990s, filmmakers have been able to piece together sequences of steps and poses into longer dance sequences, or make jumps and spins look bigger and better than they are. Technically welltrained dancers and actors are no longer necessary as moving cameras and snazzy editing techniques can make every dance routine look brilliant. Consequently, dance films, produced since the 1990s, fall into two different categories those in which the actors truly convince the audience of their mastery, and those in which technology is used to create the impression of an actor’s mastery. While professional ballet dancers from dance companies in the US and Europe were cast for the roles in Center Stage , dance films like Save the Last Dance (2001), Honey (2003 ) or Shall We Dance ? (2004) featured well-known Hollywood actresses and newcomers like Jennifer Lopez, Julia Stiles and Jessica Alba. Most of the choreographies were made by famous video and music clip choreographers who have coached pop stars like Madonna, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Robbie Williams and Justin Timberlake.

In hindsight we recognize two separate developments. The musical films of the fifties were actually dancer films, i.e., films in which dance icons were the focus. The films of the late seven ties were dance films, i.e., the art of dance in all its diverse forms and styles, its emancipative and participative merits, shift ed to the fore. By the 1990s, the film itself with all its new tech nical possibilities featured choreographed dance routines and produced seemingly brilliant dance sequences with actors who couldn’t dance at all. Basically this became a new genre we could call it the film dance.

The roles of film-dance protagonists resemble a matrix which can be easily filled with crowd-pleasing Hollywood idols. The only variations generally apply to the choice of dance style. And it’s no coincidence that the actors play characters who dance in styles that match their ethnic background, and thus satisfy the cliché the Caucasian girl who dreams of ballet (Julia Stiles), the Latina who wins the salsa competition (Jennifer Lopez) and the half African-American who dances hip hop (Jessica Alba). This ethnic context strongly distinguishes the dance films of the 1990s from their predecessors. In the 1980s the fulfilment of the dance dream was associated with freedom, breaking taboos, gen erational conflicts and the feeling of identity of an entire genera tion. In the 1990s the dance films and film dances focused on the individual fate of the main characters, their social and ethnic background, and the dance and social competition among the various ethnic groups within the same generation. This competi tion reveals the identity-forming power of dance moves and the dress codes that apply to each dance style. Indeed, these shape and reflect reality for teenagers on both sides of the Atlantic and have been assimilated in sub-cultural fashion. You dress or present yourself in such a way so »you look cooler, you know?«

What most dance films have in common from Flashdance to Honey is how they portray the dancing female body. It is the same message communicated in the mass media, namely that beauty goes hand-in-hand with sexual attractiveness. In

Flashdance , there’s the unforgettable dance scene to the song He’s a Dream which has been alluded to in music video clips ever since. Alex starts out by playing on gender roles, wear ing a suit and tie, standing against a backlight as a silhouette. Moments later, she pulls off her suit to reveal a skin-tight mini skirt underneath. Her body, arched against a chair, she pulls a chain and a gush of water splashes over her. Her dress clings to her body as she elegantly leaves her chair on high-heeled shoes. The camera zooms onto her wet body while she spins pirouettelike across the stage and whips her dripping hair back and forth. Even today this scene is regarded as the erotic dance film scene par excellence that deliberately portrays the sexually charged fe male body. It’s no wonder that the leading characters in dance films of the last ten years have systematically been played by actresses, like Jennifer Lopez, who have been marketed as sex symbols by the media. The film dance/dance film supports a body cult which for many people cannot be achieved in real life without applying »cut and paste« techniques. Before you know it, the dream of perfect dancing becomes the dream of the per fect body.

Although the trend toward sexualisation in film dance is ques tionable, other Hollywood dance films, like Honey , venture in a different direction that captures some of the spirit of the 1980s. Hip hop and breakdance, for example, are portrayed as forms that teach young people responsibility, stability and self-disci pline through dance, and thereby improve their chances of par ticipating in and integrating into society. As an educational con cept of empowerment for youngsters, dance can refer to the mental impulses of those popular dance films which are now in corporated in advanced artistic dance scenes, such as works by choreographers like Constanza Macras/Dorky Park and Roys ton Maldoom.

Even though the image of stars like Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Beal or Jennifer Lopez continue to determine how successful dance films become, these stars are only known for a specific dance style which they literally embody.

Ultimately it seems that dance itself is what excites and fascinates us, tells stories and shows us new perspectives. And meanwhile, dance films have a tradition and a canon of classics which provide plenty of material for revivals. They apparently have what it takes to become cult. After Dirty Dancing , I actu ally look forward to seeing what new revivals will be pasted up on billboards in the future.

Christina Deloglu , born in 1980, is a theatre scholar. From 2000 to 2006 she worked at directing in several theatres in Germany and Chicago. In 2007 she joined the management team of the literature house Lettrétage in Ber lin. Deloglu has worked as a guest lecturer and research assistant in the special research area »Performative Cultures« at the Freie Universität Berlin since 2008

1 Shipyard workers on strike, June 1936, photographer un known

undated, photographer unknown

This year has been proclaimed a commemorative year, marking the eventful and momentous developments in Europe which all began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With such fanfare, we felt it was important to listen to the quieter voices beneath the tumult. We asked young male writers from the Czech Republic, Romania, Hungary and Poland to describe their experiences and how the social transformation, which arose through European unification, has affected their relationship to their fathers. The result was a short literary series titled Fathers & Sons , in which the joy of a narrow escape always seems to take a different form. Our series concludes with a story by the Polish writer Wojciech Kuczok who describes his life at home, how familial relationships were influenced by society, how dif ficult it was for people of different generations to communicate with one another, and how against all odds they succeeded in the end.

how we failed to over throw communism

by wojciech kuczok

After the thirteenth of December when martial law was declared, my father raged amid unfulfilled curses, coming up with all man ner of never-implemented forms of protest against the system on a daily basis, as if wanting to justify himself to us for the fact that no one had thought of interning him. Once martial law had en tered the phase of being a horrid everyday bore, my father decid ed that my school year should be cut short. He did not actually remove me from school he didn’t approve of truancy and kept a stern eye on my educational progress but he told me to be sure to miss all the official ceremonies, because, so he claimed, every event of that kind was essentially just an opportunity for the indoctrinators to put on a show any sort of commemora tion, special assembly, ceremonial opening, halfway mark or fin ishing point was designed to delude the young people, as he put it, with poppycock, senile twaddle, and even gob-shite about the irrefutable virtues of socialism. (My father never could curb his tongue once he started going on about the regime; my mother used to get upset with him for swearing it was bad enough at breakfast, but in front of the child and he would claim that such a vulgar state of affairs could only be described by vulgar vocabulary).

So once we had been given our marks and a time of replacement or curtailed lessons began, with outings to the Red Army monu ment, my father reckoned I didn’t have to wait for the certificates to be handed out. »That’s enough, son, those commies aren’t go ing to teach you any more we’re off on holiday.« He disregard ed the potential threat of my marks being lowered for bad behav iour, saying that in an enslaved, occupied country, which moreover had been stuck in a state of extreme helplessness for the past six months, it was bad form to have good marks for conduct only future conformists had good marks for conduct. In the free Poland of the future that he would not live to see, but that I would, and my children were sure to, no one would be showing off the positive school reports for conduct they got in times of terror, lies, contempt and so on. The more the horrid, everyday bore phase swept over the people, who were gradually but inexo rably getting used to this new stage of gloom and lack of pros pects, the more easily my father got into his anti-state ranting.

The quieter people became, the more fiercely he rattled away. The more they all sank into a state of acceptance and stupor, the more rabidly he wagged his finger, incited and called for war, but only behind the closed door of his own homestead of course, only addressing us, the household members, in other words me just finishing year three at primary school with disgracefully good results (he praised them unenthusiastically, as if regretting that I wasn’t attending secret classes or founding a student oppo sition movement, but that I was perfecting my reading and writ ing skills on texts chosen by the communist ministry of educa tion) and my mother, professionally performing the duties of a housewife. And so in our house the fighting spirit was not al lowed to die, as over and over ad nauseam my father showed me the specimens of weapons he had not handed in when ordered to. He was proud of this act of disobedience and pointed it out as an example of his own bravery, although actually all he had was a miner’s sword that had belonged to my grandfather and a sports gun. He’d caress, dust and polish the sword and the pistol with a rag. We had had no idea either of them existed before now, because they’d been lying among the junk in the cellar. While my father had remembered Granddad’s sword, finding the air pistol, which he hadn’t used since the sporting days of his youth, was an event of historical importance. Here was some truly ille gal indifference in fact seditious non-compliance may have been committed; without leaving the house without so much as opening the windows, without drawing the curtains my father had become a conspirator. Actually, all that was left of the pellets for the gun was some empty boxes, and there was no way we could have pulled off an uprising with a bird-scarer like that, but my father stubbornly claimed that this weapon had symbolic force the point wasn’t the cartridges, but the idea, and I was too young to understand that.

When June came, a mild stir overtook the country, an excitement, a sense of anticipation, and everyone suddenly raised their heads, as if they had heard the echo of trumpets from beyond the hills, but it wasn’t the nation rising from its knees to unite and beat up the enemy that they felt coming, nor a new wave of strikes and demonstrations being planned, though there may have been one

under preparation, there may well have been a desire to show solidarity and fight, but it was a different inner flutter and tremble that absorbed the so-called general populace, a different sort of union was established in those days, focusing on a new national dilemma: the World Cup was just about to start and Poland was taking part, so should they support it or not? Whom had our team gone to Spain to represent the oppressors or the op pressed? The toughest, most hardened and most rabid anti-com munists, who boycotted the radio, television, theatre, cinema, public transport (because the buses were red) and so on, those who had long since moved the televisions out of their houses, suddenly began to feel sorrow, and the closer it got to the open ing of the World Cup, the louder their sighs, torn as they were between sticking to their guns and their passion for soccer. My father had got rid of the telly soon after the General’s chil dren’s hour broadcast, and now, faced with the impending world championships, for the first time he felt regret, panic even, be cause how could you not get emotional, how could you deny yourself the opportunity to witness what was going to happen: Our Lads, or, as they said in Silesia, the »Poloks«, had gone to win the World Cup, or, as they said in Silesia, were »off to the champs«. The Chorzów trainer was going to take our team to the top, this time for certain, third time lucky what Górski and Gmoch had almost managed, »noo our wee lad«, Antos´ from Hajduki, was going to achieve. So my father, never famous for his good neighbourly relations, would have nowhere to watch the World Cup, and consequently I too would have to rely on a jammed radio station for fragmentary accounts of my first con sciously anticipated event of this kind it was the only channel my father would tolerate. I was not amused, and was even considering how to get myself invited over for football evenings to those of my mates whose dads had only got rid of their black-andwhite tellies in order to buy new, colour ones. I had even started the preliminary greasing-up in the breaks, treating them to fruit juice as if for no reason, lending them special editions of war stories in the »Yellow Tiger« series on a no return basis, offering seemingly senseless swaps on collector’s grounds, exchanging the most prized specimens of plastic figures of Polish kings and

dukes for the most easily available bah! I was even prepared to pull the tiny propeller off the Spitfire I had glued together my self and offer it to a mate whose own had got broken during the spring cleaning the scale of the sacrifices I was capable of mak ing just to see Our Lads, the »Poloks«, play in the World Cup, seemed to have no limits. ItalyPolandPeruCameroon that was the incantation echoing in my bonce like a mantra, in that order, because that was the group we’d drawn, and from the boy’s magazine S ´ wiat Młodych to the boy’s paper Sztandar Młodych, from the Baltic Sea to the Tatra mountains, the length and breadth of the country this phrase was being repeated, a cleverly rhyth mic quatrain, a syllable-timed masterpiece, a haiku expressing an emotional promise only on a par with unsealing a parcel from the Reich. I couldn’t even imagine the level of suffering that not watching the championships could cause me, I refused to imag ine such torture, though I had no idea how to avoid it just like the man who never thinks about death, though he knows it inevitably awaits him; the thought of inevitable death was quite incapable of horrifying me as much as the thought of missing the broadcasts, and all those matches I wasn’t going to see. So when my father engineered things to take us on holiday early, initially my despair reached its zenith, because all my toadying efforts were going to come to nothing instead I was going to be driven far away from my mates and their »Rubin« Soviet tellies with the hoarse voice of the commentator Jan Ciszewski. When it soon transpired that we were going to a village in the moun tains, my mind, which so far only knew the countryside from school set reading, made straight for barefoot swineherds, hen houses roofed in thatch, dirt floors and chimney-corners; the hope that they might have a television set there in the village, or even that they’d ever heard of team sports was rather faint. In stead it looked as if we were decisively waving goodbye to civilisation, and I wouldn’t even be able to write down the plain results in my little notebook after all, it was a dead cert the papers didn’t reach the village, because who’d be able to read them there among all those goat-milkers, music-makers, Mopsas and Dorcases?

We left on opening day. Our Lads weren’t taking part yet, but al ready the former champions from over the ocean were going to show their class, it was already being written about, talked about and looked forward to, as we were travelling the highway towards Zakopane in an old Fiat with rusty patches here and there under ivory-coloured paint that concealed its scars (because proper, pure white was an unattainable colour in People’s Poland industry was incapable of producing car paint in pure white, as if there were a spell on the factories, the curse of God, a fatal flaw, fuck knows what; if you wanted a white car, you got a brand new one straight from the plant, and it was ivory a fashionable colour, trendier than white, white would be asking for trouble in a country that’s forever covered in dust, all grey and miser able, pure white would be like a poke in the eye, so there’s dirty white on offer, with the more aesthetic, genteel name of ivory).

»Do admire the view go on, take a look, don’t let your head droop!«

»Look around you, come on, take a peek, see how beautiful it is!«

»Don’t read what have you got there? You’ll ruin your eyes. Just look out of the window!«

»You’ll feel sick again drop the reading and see how beautiful it is!«

»What lovely scenery! It’s fabulous!«

»What a place! It’s breathtaking!« They were right, of course, because as soon as we had lumbered up the switchbacks we saw the Tatras looming among the clouds, and although we were almost in Nowy Targ before my parents learned to tell the crags and the clouds apart properly, a great

space had opened before us, and it really was easy to get choked about it, because whatever the case, the space around us had been shrinking on a daily basis, especially in the state of extreme help lessness that hung over the country where food and clothing were rationed, phone conversations were monitored and police cur fews were in force. It was hard to get used to such open, bound less space all of a sudden my father had to stop the car because his head was spinning, and my mother was trying to ward off a fit of agoraphobia with delight. They got out of the car, gawped at the view and inhaled the air, while I sat in the back, crumpling my copy of Supporter’s Treasure and counting out the minutes until the moment of doom, because the opening match was get ting closer just as rapidly as we were getting further away from the only civilisation I knew, the urban kind. I was snivelling with helplessness: if not for those blasted men in uniform my father would never have thrown out the telly. When my parents asked why I wasn’t gawping and inhaling, but snivelling, I replied that it was because of those blasted men in uniform, because of martial law, because of the commies and all that. My father was proudly surprised exactly that; pride pervaded his astonishment at the fact that the anti-communist in me had so suddenly and emo tionally manifested itself he stroked my head and consoled me, saying: »Don’t worry, it doesn’t affect us, we’re on holiday now. And besides, the World Cup is starting, aren’t you pleased? We’re going to watch the matches, support Our Lads…« How can we do that in a village? There are no water pipes or electricity there, just yokels coughing now and then in a musty room they eat raw sorrel straight from the meadow and they treat consumption with Hail Marys; how great my surprise, backed by disbelief, as I asked where exactly we were going to watch these matches.

»What do you mean, where? What do you think, son, why did I get you out of school early? Why did I prescribe a holiday for us starting from today of all days? Do you think your father was born yesterday? I questioned the farmer, and he promised there is a television, though sometimes it goes snowy when the foehn wind is blowing… I, my son, am a consistent fellow, and once I say something, I don’t go back on my word. I said that while those moronic bastards in uniforms and all those other reptiles are trying to dupe us, you won’t have the pleasure of the telly in our house! But you’ve got to support the lads, you can’t abandon them what’s football got to do with politics? So we’re off on holiday to the farmer, we’ll watch the World Cup in the evenings, and breathe fresh air in the day time, take in some fine views, go for some walks and so on. I tell you, son, our holi day is going to continue as long as Our Lads are playing, as long as Poland hasn’t been eliminated…«

»…as long as we’re still alive,« added my mother, wilfully de tached as usual from matters of the highest soccer-related impor tance.

Poland’s first matches, when our lads groped each other against Italy, then Cameroon, were uninspiring: no poetry, no technical magic or crazy storms, just impotence, a blockade, and an infec tious one too, because the opposition were just as exhausted by us as we were by them those first few matches were played un der the banner of Poland the Tormentor and the Tormented. My father, who watched all these struggles by virtue of redefined pa triotic duty, recognised that it was a symbolic attitude our lads were playing mournful football as a mark of protest against the state of decay and the time of troubles plaguing the motherland, whereas the opposition could not possibly do anything else but move at the same pace as this funeral cortege.

Towards the end of the second week of our holiday, when the Poles crushed the Belgians in the quarter-finals, my father quietly began to pray for them to get eliminated in an honourable way, because if they reached the semi-finals, he’d be a goner he

wouldn’t be able to keep up with the drinking, and it would be bad form for him to excuse himself from the non-stop highland carousals. My mother lamented, spread her arms in despair, and wanted to go home, but my father firmly stuck to his view that if the highlanders sniffed out any weakness in him, he’d lose their respect forever; his liver was swelling by the day, his sight was go ing foggy, his sweat was going sour and his breath was becoming foul and nervous, but he put a brave face on it, saying the done thing was not to go against popular tradition but to join in with the local customs when in Rome…, etcetera. Seeking ways to justify his absence, he started going on hikes to the peaks, curs ing the hindrances encountered in the border zone by every citi zen of People’s Poland, stuck as it was in its different, unique state. He gazed with longing at the Slovak summits, recalling the days of the Tourist Convention, and used old maps on which the border was just a thicker line across the mountain ranges. (On the new ones the world ended at the border the border ridge of the Tatras was the edge of nothingness, and the latest topographi cal maps were terrifyingly empty. On the Czechoslovak side there was no Belianske ridge, no Lomnica, Ladovy Peak or Ger lach, none of the Smokovec villages nor Lake S ˇ trba, no Rohacˇe or Mount Osobita beyond the southern border, according to the detailed map, there was nothing, just a blank page, anti-mat ter, and so the Tatras were Ultima Thule; when the clouds sank low and the mountains disappeared, those maps became fright eningly credible).

However, along came an extraordinary match, for my father the most important match possible, a match of the highest rank, the match of matches, the match to top all matches, the greatest match ever, more than a match, for here on our path to the semifinals of the World Cup stood the Soviets. For this event even the greatest slobs sobered up, had a wash and put their faith in the Blessed Virgin Mary, even the most virulent ignoramuses who shuddered at the sound of the referee’s whistle decided to sit in front of the television, explaining that this wasn’t just about foot ball, or even politics, this was an issue of national independence, so to speak it was The Issue. This match couldn’t be watched on the little farm telly, not just because of the poor picture, but because no one wanted to watch the war against the Soviets on Soviet equipment. This had to be witnessed solemnly, as a herd, best of all conspiratorially, on the biggest possible, Western-made screen. And thus at the parish house, in Father Bz´dzioch’s cate chism classroom, which was often used to project religious films, as well as ones that for various reasons the authorities found in convenient. On these occasions the crowds of summer visitors on holiday in the mountains could come along to the mini-cine ma with a sense of conspiracy and watch tatty video tapes of Je sus of Nazareth , Ben Hur or Doctor Zhivago , but also each successive James Bond adventure and some poorer ac tion films, selected if only for the fact that the main baddie in them was a Russian, who was defeated in the final scene by the good American, pretty often defeated brutally, bloodily and fa tally, at which point the catechism classroom would give an espe cially lively reaction as the death of the low-down Russki stirred rampant euphoria among the audience. Soon after they’d recite a communal prayer while the closing credits rolled, a prayer that was duly modified and improvised by Father Bz´dzioch, a wellknown Russophobe: »Lord save us from the Russki plague and from famine, burn the red pestilence with fire, let us win the war against the Soviets, the silent war that our nation is waging, tor mented in our hearts and souls, Lord in your mercy grant us the freedom we crave«.

For the match against the Russkies Bz´dzioch got the classroom well sorted out, hiring a second housekeeper to clean it and deco rate it in scenery of his own personal design on the walls hung a display of hysteria fit to fuel a fighting mood; over here we had

Katyn´, over there the Battle of Warsaw, here the Soviet invasion of 17 September 1939, here and there earlier history, Poland from the Baltic to the Black Sea and a raid on Moscow. For the kiddies and youth who weren’t interested in the match he even arranged a special playroom, where the older ones could throw darts at a target on which likenesses of the Russian revolutionary leaders cut out of the title pages of Pravda and Izvestiya had been stuck; meanwhile the younger ones could profane cheap portraits of them with poster paints. The atmosphere fa voured victory, all the more since all the Poles needed to humiliate the Russkies in this match was a draw. The classroom was bursting at the seams, though with the help of the curate the priest carefully monitored the identity of the fans coming in to be sure, as my father explained to me, there was no stink of secret police inside. And so I finally experienced the aura of the underground state, all those Solidarity slogans written in red on white, the crucified Christ draped equally in votive offer ings and the badges of fighting Poland; the devotional objects mixed with patriotic knick-knacks were deceptively ugly, but their force was great and spoke out directly on the one hand Sursum corda, on the other Down with the commies, a prayer and a call to arms. I felt as if this sudden combination of religious, civic and football-related emotions might cause me a fit of religious bigotry, so from now on I’d start attending Oasis Catholic youth meetings, set up a Legion of Mary fighting unit, or maybe even enter a seminary, get ordained and become a fierce, merciless priest like the reverend Bz´dzioch, railing at the commies and opportunists, traitors and sneaks from the pul pit. How lovely the clear division of good and evil seemed to me… Instead of focusing on the match, in which from the very start the Poles had decided to play for time, thus driving the teamski of hopeless clodhoppers crazy, as well as the supporters baying for blood, sweat and tears, I was experiencing illumina tion. I drifted off into the world of the militant church; despite the crush in the classroom, God’s temple emanated cold and incense; stupefied, I started imagining the sort of priest I’d be in the future. I knew Catholic priests are divided into »bent« ones and thunderers; I didn’t like the first kind, they made me laugh with their soft voices and that special sort of church whis per they used to expound the teaching of Christ it sounded as if they had their mouths full of something disgusting, and if you ran into them in civvies it would be hard not to take them for queers. Maybe that was why they wore dog collars, to preserve respect indeed, every highlander bowed to the priest, though there was no special tolerance for homosexuality in the mountains. I imagined myself as a thundering priest, not whis pering but shouting, flogging with dogma, calling for vengeance, urging rebellion against those who kept wanting to crucify Christ all over again; I imagined my own sacred power, the gov ernment of souls, the cruel force of a lack of absolution, and sud denly I had a very nice feeling, such a pleasant one in my belly, as if something sweet and hot were just about to flood my inside. Half-conscious, I fixed my gaze on an image of the Madonna and Child, and as I sank deep into delirium I saw her bare breast feeding the infant, and then, for the first time in my life, I fainted just at the moment when in Barcelona Smolarek was danc ing with the ball in the corner of the pitch, dodging so cleverly that the furious Soviets couldn’t get it off him any other way than by a foul.

So we managed a triumphant draw, we achieved a victorious compromise, sullying our joy at promotion to the medal zone by failing to put the icing on the cake, as I found out at home, from my mother, who pumped me full of aspirin, put lemon tea by my bed and finally felt needed; now that I had fallen ill, she could do her motherly best. My father was trebly disconsolate; firstly he’d had to leave the room before the end with the ailing me,

then he was disappointed that we hadn’t beaten the Soviets, and also because Boniek wouldn’t be able to play in the semifinal against Italy after getting a second card such a pity, because the first one he got was so stupid, for nothing, he’d let himself get caught as the first to hand in a deliberately slow shamble to form a wall. Even in getting eliminated the Soviets had caused us grief our victory had been mutilated. Yet everyone knew that even if we lost all the games ahead of us, we’d be playing to the very end, so my holiday was set to con tinue through the first ten days of July. My father was afraid whether more for his pancreas or his liver I don’t know and was wondering what it would be more dreadful to die of, peritonitis or cirrhosis. My mother said he should show some willpower, learn to say no, stop joining in, complying, and becoming a fellow addict. She said this month in the mountains had made a thorough alcoholic of him soon he’d look like those stickthin fellows from outside the pub who shat and puked on them selves, he’d have to go and live at the detox centre. What sort of example was he giving the child? His voice had already gone hoarse, his brain had gone slack, his knob had gone limp yes, she rolled out the heaviest cannon in spite of my presence. But still my father surrendered to non-stop intoxication, sustained by a morning hair of the dog, and said with the disgusting calm of a drunkard that he had it all under control; as soon as Poland won the World Cup we’d go home to Silesia and the drinking would be over. Drawling the rustling consonants, it took him a clear effort to speak, but his tirades never lost steam:

»You know me, woman, sho you know that when I make up my mind, there’sh no mercy; everything I’ve ever come to in life I owe to my own radical shtance and refushal to compromizhe, sho when I shay I’ve decided radically and uncompromizhingly to drink for a month with our hoshts here, it’sh only in order to acquire an ultimate, definitive revulsion for alcohol and become a teetotaller ash shoon ash we get home.«

»Mister, you’re never going to get home, because they’re go ing to drink you to death here. Anyway, there’s no point casting blame on the highlanders you’ve quite simply got a tendency, you’ve always been fond of a drop, it was bound to end like this, the time was obviously ripe for it. I’ll just tell you one thing if by some miracle you make it through to the eleventh and actual ly do drive us home, you can forget about vodka, forget about beer for the rest of your life, fuck it all you can even forget bloody liqueur chocolates!«

»Don’t you swear at me, don’t you use that language to me!«

»Mother of God, I never swear you can see what a state you’ve reduced me to…«

Yet my father had in him the uncontrollable male ambition, the instinct to match, best of all to surpass others, and so, although he couldn’t understand how the highlanders were able to con sume such large amounts of vodka and still function fairly nor mally, he tanked up as much as them, getting drunk far more easily and quickly in the process, which didn’t win him any es teem at all.

Fate had stopped smiling; in Spain too, without Boniek our lads, the »Poloks«, proved as helpless as children in a fog, and lost the semi-final against Italy. At once a nationwide sulk began, for how could it be, what had we gone so far for, why had we got so excited about it all, and who was responsible? Why hadn’t Piechniczek put Szarmach on the field? Suddenly the fairytale everyone had been so fixed on, as they forgot the everyday misery and de jection, had turned out to have a disastrous ending. The entire country was swathed in gloom, depression and despair: we’re not going to be world champions after all. What a pity, we came so close if we’d become the world champions the communist re gime would have had to collapse from the shock of this starved, plundered country being capable of such a triumph. If we’d won

the World Cup the generals would have had to call off rationing, call off the curfew, call off socialism and raise the Iron Curtain. Tourists from the West would have started visiting the land of the world champions; the nation that prays best in the world and that plays football best in the world would have been admired by the world’s other nations. I tell you truly, if in July ’82 we had got into the final of the World Cup and won it against Germany, the world would have shook to its foundations, all the Gastar beiters would have come back to the Silesian mines, all the high landers from what they call Sicago would have flown across the Atlantic in time for the harvest, the highlander families missing them would have hung up banners on their houses saying »A Hearty Welcome« all the émigrés would have come back to Poland to clean up after the commies. In the land of the world champions no one would have scowled at anyone else, because no one would have known resentment, no one would have had complexes, the little shrimps would have become basketball players, the compulsive onanists would have become playboys, the accursed poets would have been beautifully reconciled with the world in new epic poems, the critics would have praised every single film and every single book, the debt collector would have taken from the rich and given to the poor, the conductors would have issued free tickets to the fare-dodgers, days of national love would have been declared ah, how wonderful it would have been, if it weren’t for Paolo Rossi and his two goals, two stabs straight into our hearts, two faces of sorrow, two zeros, and the day after tomorrow we’re going home; all that was left was the consolation game.

Wojciech Kuczok , born in the Polish town of Chorzów in 1972 is a writer and film critic. He has also worked as a journalist for several maga zines, including Tygodnik Powszechny and Res Publica Nowa . He began his writing career in the 1990s and was a member of the poets’ group Na Dziko . His first volume of stories was published in 1999. In 2004 Kuczok re ceived the Nike Literary Prize one of the most important literary awards in Poland for his novel Gnój [Muck]. That same year his screenplay Pre˛gi was awarded the top prize at the Polish film festival Gdynia. His most recent publication is a volume of essays titled Höllisches Kino (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008 ). Wojciech Kuczok lives in Cracow and is a current scholar of the DAAD Berlin Artists-in-Residence Programme.

sisyphus at the museum accepting decay in the age of technical conservation by stefan koldehoff

The Federal Cultural Foundation, together with the Cultural Foundation of Ger man States, is currently funding the Programme for the Conserva tion of Moveable Cultural Assets ( KUR) . Each of the 26 projects aims to preserve important cultural-historic works or collections which are seri ously threatened by deterioration. Considering how little money and capacity is available to museums, archives and libraries to adequately conserve their collec tions, the funding measures come as a small drop in a large ocean. Nonetheless, it is important that cultural policymakers are reminded of this dire situation through persistent public discourse. In the following article, Stefan Koldehoff examines how and to what extent we can meet the extensive conservatorial chal lenges of today and whether we necessarily need to.

Some public authorities have begun to view museums, memorial sites, archives and libraries as competitors of the modern enter tainment industry, which, in turn, has changed society’s percep tion of these institutions. Today, it seems they are solely interest ed in hosting the most spectacular exhibitions of their own and loaned collections. And the length of the queue outside the door appears to be the only relevant measure of their importance. This is at least the way many responsible officials in parliament, com mittees and commissions see it, those who regularly make deci sions on how to finance the stockpile of our cultural memory. Because the criteria for this periodic distribution process have long been coupled to the standards of the commercial entertain ment business, directors of public educational institutes are now forced to participate in a ridiculous, never-ending race. Only those who are visible in the media or at least in public dis course are regarded as important enough to receive funding by those who are responsible for distributing it. And to be visible, they must attract attention by presenting themselves as ad vantageously as possible. Of course, the downside of this devel opment may lead to a Caravaggio exhibition that doesn’t include a single Caravaggio, a Modigliani retrospective that displays a dozen alleged forgeries, and a Leonardo exhibition that only fea tures facsimiles and not a single original by the Renaissance mas ter himself.

A more serious consequence, however, is that museums, libraries and archives have less time and money to invest in the three oth er equally important tasks with which they were entrusted 400 years ago when the highly exclusive, privately-owned art cabinets and wunderkammer were handed over to the slowly-emerg ing civic sphere. And is it any wonder? The presentation of their collections, the traditional task of preparing and exhibiting, is an outward activity aimed at a viewing public. The three other traditional tasks of archives and museums collecting, re searching and preserving are not necessarily meant for the public eye, as they are generally regarded as the less attractive re quirements for presenting cultural treasures at some later time.

Who cares about the negotiations which the director of a munici pal archive has to hold with the cultural committee and the city treasurer to finally procure an incredibly important folio for the city which had been privately owned for centuries? Who wants to read long professional articles, published in arcane yearbooks, which meticulously analyze the content of an artwork, procured with tremendous effort? And who really wants to take the time to learn about the technical, chemical and physical methods used to preserve a cultural asset so that future generations can contin

ue studying and viewing it? We live in a visual age in which peo ple are only interested in what they can see, not the tedious proc ess leading up to the collective and optical appropriation of the works in the exhibition room. In other words, people are not in terested in the preparation work that makes it all possible to be gin with.

However, preservation has become an increasingly important activity for those entrusted with these cultural assets which doc ument the history of our country, continent and world, and strongly shape our identity in all its diversity. First, there is a very basic, quantitative reason for the increasing significance of this task more and more people are producing more artefacts and cultural works. At the very least, we must consider which of these are worth preserving. Historic awareness is growing along with the desire for almost encyclopaedic collections. In Berlin, the Humboldt Forum will soon be presenting the cultural history of the world. Other institutions with similar monumental aspira tions in London, Paris and Washington are already demonstrat ing how a museum can achieve this with as many original works from around the world as possible, all of which require conservation. It seems ironic, but in a globalised world capable of producing a constant supply of new virtual worlds, the desire for real objects is growing by the day, objects we can look at and understand with explanation. To understand our increasingly complex world, people want to be able to touch it again.

But at the same time, the cultural assets, entrusted to archives, li braries and museums over the past centuries, are literally falling apart as the materials age and decay. If we look at the long list of projects which the Federal Cultural Foundation is funding through its KUR Programme for the Conservation of Moveable Cultural Assets, we find a good cross-section of the quality and quantity of those conservational tasks which museums from Flensburg to Füssen and from Aachen to Frankfurt/Oder are faced with. If there had been archives and libraries in Sisyphus’s time, he would have never needed a boulder.

For instance, the Berlin State Library has thousands of newspa per pages from the past 150 years. In order to digitalize them, the pieces of cracked, brittle paper must first be fixed and laminated. At the German Hygiene Museum researchers are working on methods to conserve around 2 ,000 wax moulages which were used long ago as visual documentation of sicknesses for training purposes and exhibits. At the Merseburg Cathedral, the pewter sarcophagi in the royal tomb must be structurally refurbished

and then cleaned of the layers of grime which completely ob scure the ornate decoration. At the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, broken jar seals and fluctuating temperatures are causing alcohol to evaporate from almost 260,000 jars of pre served animal specimens in its so-called wet collection a prob lem which similar collections around the world are also facing. Historic keyboard instruments in Weimar, Umbrian panel paint ings in Altenburg, architectural drawings by Hans Scharoun and fabrics produced by the Pausa textile printing manufacturer in Mössingen in Baden Württemberg these and numerous other projects, though vastly diverse, have one thing in common there is no simple, ready-made solution. For each of these tasks, conservators must first develop a method in interdisci plinary cooperation with universities and research institutes to stop the process of deterioration of certain materials so that the damage that has already occurred can be repaired. For exam ple, the problem of deterioration in elastomers moulded, elas tic synthetics used in tyres, rubber bands and gaskets was nev er recognized as a major problem by past generations of conser vators because we are only now seeing the effects of elastomer decay. Several laboratories and institutes, including the German Mining Museum and the Filmmuseum Potsdam, are currently investigating solutions because their collections are all suffering from the same problem in various ways.

authenticity and reversibility

For a long time there have been two basic ethical principles of conservational philosophy authenticity and reversibility. We have yet to see to what extent their validity in the fine arts can be applied to other areas and future techniques. Following the conservation work of a painting, drawing or sculpture, we gener ally expect that the difference between the original piece and the subsequent retouching will be visible. The general consensus among experts from a wide variety of fields is that the conserva tion of damaged works or enhancement of artistic surfaces should neither result in a perfect forgery nor create the impres sion of authenticity which no longer exists. It is standard today to extensively document and photograph all the various phases of conservation work.

There are some, however, who believe we shouldn’t even attempt to make the work resemble the original as closely as possible. For example, if a saint’s face was defaced on a painting during the iconoclastic movement of the 16th century, these experts might simply repair the canvas and paint the damaged area in a mono chrome shade of grey.

At the same time, there is the principle of reversibility which holds that if a better method for slowing the aging process be de veloped in the future, the methods used today should not stand in the way of future conservation work. In the case of Buddhist cave murals from the 5th to 12th centuries, discovered along a stretch of the northern Silk Road and transported to the Berlin Museum of Asian Art 100 years ago, conservators in the 1970s and 1980s tried to stabilize the fragile images with synthetic bonding agents. Meanwhile we’ve discovered that the acrylates and polyvinylacetates contained in these bonding agents are subject to aging processes themselves and can permanently change the colour of the paintings. Now researchers in Germany, together with their colleagues from the University of Beijing, must reverse the measures applied by their colleagues thirty years ago before they can start the real conservation work on the murals. For years, doubling was a common practice for conserv ing European paintings, which involved gluing a second layer of fabric underneath a fragile canvas to strengthen it. Now decades later, conservators have discovered that the wax-based bonding agents have slowly penetrated the layers of paint and now threat en to disintegrate them. What people thought would save these works of art is actually potentially destroying them. As a result, numerous dark spots are now visible on many of Van Gogh’s paintings.

However, this second conservatorial principle that of reversi bility is not always practicable because preserving important cultural assets under time pressure usually takes precedence. To stabilize the newspaper pages in Berlin, for example, they’re be ing laminated in plastic foil which cannot be removed at a later time. Some people may find it regrettable, but this is not neces sarily so. In this case, the basic decision was to save the content not the material. Up till now, saving both has seemed impossible as perhaps will be the case in the future due to the wealth of material produced by humankind which is being collected but cannot be preserved indefinitely in all its diversity. Perhaps we must accept the fact that an idea can survive without preserv ing it in its original material form for ages.

This consideration, however, breaks a taboo that has long existed in the educational and cultural fabric of our society because it leads to a much more fundamental question. With the world changing and developing at a quickening pace, if we no longer preserve our cultural achievements, what is there left to do at these places where society stores its collective memory? This question is taboo because it challenges the image cultivated by

museums, archives and libraries. Their task was clearly defined by the International Council of Museums ( ICOM ) in 1986 and supplemented with the »Code of Ethics for Museums« in 2001 In the section titled »Care of Collections«, ICOM writes: »The basic responsibility of all museum personnel is to properly care for and preserve the museum’s collections and individual pieces. They are entrusted with the task of preserving the collec tions for future generations in as good and safe a condition as practicable, having regard to current knowledge and resources.«

The guideline addresses the critical limitations of this basic prin ciple with regard to preserving original works of culture for com ing generations by adding that each generation of conservators is responsible for continuing the development of »current knowl edge«. This opens the door to the possibility that conservators may someday come to the conclusion that some things are not going to be preserved for all time. The second limitation of this guideline the available »resources« has been a chronic prob lem for collections for decades; public collections constantly lack these resources for their conservation work.

The German Association of Museums released a memorandum in 2006 titled »Standards for Museums« which described its task in a similar way, which most responsible authorities in archives and libraries would subscribe to without reservation: »The re sponsibility of museums is to preserve works of the past and present for the long term and safeguard them for the future.«

This first sentence is lacking the term original, which is only hint ed at in the second sentence, which reiterates the importance of »specific knowledge regarding safety, climate, material character istics, the results and processes of damage, proper handling of the objects and conservation and preservation procedures.«

Looking again at the first sentence of this agenda, what if we im agine that the long-term preservation of the »works of the past and present« does not necessarily refer to the preservation of orig inals? In view of the chronic lack of money and space, technical and personnel problems, and the fight against decay (a battle we are losing in some cases), isn’t it conceivable to concentrate on the content instead? And doesn’t this particularly apply to dupli cated works such as books, printed in large numbers, or tech nical media which will certainly produce a surge of documents that will pose great challenges to archivists, challenges we can only vaguely foresee today?

In many cases we are simply unable to rescue the original works from deterioration. The KUR programme includes some exam

We are all familiar with these terms, but distin guishing them from one another is almost a sci ence in itself. In the following we try to preserve and restore some clarity in this jungle of termi nology.

Preservation (Lat. prae- : before + servare , to guard) is a word we associate nowadays with food perishables, whereby preservatives and canned goods are not exactly held in high regard. In the field of artworks and other cultural assets, preservation measures aim to safe guard the current state of the work and prevent, or at least slow down, its further deterioration. The conservator should not alter the appearance of the piece if it can be avoided, and attempt to preserve its functional quality. Damage preven tion has also become an increasingly important aspect of preservation measures. This involves creating and maintaining all the external condi tions that protect the artistic and cultural assets from damage and decay. For example, such measures include procuring adequate museum rooms for storage and exhibitions, installing se curity systems against theft, fire and pollutants, and ensuring the pieces are properly handled during transport. The goal of preventative preservation is to pre-emptively lessen risks which will help avoid necessary, direct and ex pensive conservation measures at a later time (→ conservation ). This field has become so significant that some universities now offer special degree programmes in Preventative Preservation.

Conservation (Lat. com- : (intensive) + servare : to guard) is not synonymous with (→) restoration, as some may believe. In fact, re storing a work to its original state is impossible, as the effects of aging, damage and loss cannot simply be reversed. Furthermore, there is a heat ed debate among experts as to what can be con sidered the original condition of a work. And while (→) preservation involves measures that safeguard the work, conservation in volves close contact with the object. With a minimum of restoration, the conservator should try to preserve as much of the original substance as possible so that it can fulfil a cultural-historic function. Consequently, conservation work tries to respect the aesthetic, historical and physical characteristics of the piece whenever possible. Preserving the appearance of the piece in rela-

what is the difference between

conservation

preservation

restoration

reconstruction

renovation

prevention?

tion to its age is one of the primary goals of con servation. In some cases, the major challenge is to simultaneously preserve the usability or func tionality of the pieces, for example, architectural plans, musical apparatus and kinetic sculptures.

The conservation process usually begins with a preliminary analysis, followed by a conservation al concept (e.g., cleaning, reshaping as a result of mechanical deformation or material weakness, additions and retouching, etc.), documentation of all the steps and ongoing controlling (moni toring its condition, regular cleaning, etc.).

Conservation work is divided into several areas which traditionally focus on special groups of materials, such as wood, paintings, metal, paper, stone, textiles and ceramics. In recent years, universities have introduced disciplines which not only emphasize the material characteristics, but also the cultural context of the pieces, e.g., courses in Technical Cultural Assets, Ethno graphic Objects, Media Art and Archaeological Cultural Assets.

Restoration is derived from the Latin word restaurare (to restore), which, as mentioned above, has little to do with the job of conserva tion. In the political sciences, restoration refers to the reinstatement of a political condition, usually following revolutionary events. Gener ally, reactionary forces (which are not to be con fused with conservatives!) participate in politi cal restoration.

Another meaning of restoration is some what antiquated and refers to the area of gas tronomy. Traditionally restaurants were plac es to go to restore one’s spirits and health. How ever, as we know, restaurants do not provide true restoration, i.e., they are incapable of returning us to our original condition. Although we may no longer be hungry, we leave the restaurant feeling just as old as we did going in.

Renovation (Lat. re- : again + novare : to make new) has the least to do with conservation when used in reference to buildings, city quar ters, etc. Renovation involves completely replac ing building components and materials in order to optimize their function according to modern standards. While restoration entails re storing objects to their original condition, reno vation aims to update and modernize what has become antiquated or dilapidated. Both preservation and conservation methods focus solely on that which remains. Nothing is reconstructed (Lat. reconstruere : to build again), replaced or renovated. The difference between preservation and conserva tion lies in the purpose of the measures. Preser vation measures aim to safeguard the artistic and cultural asset, while conservation measures attempt to improve the viewer’s understanding of the work. This understanding can be ham pered if important pieces of the object or its im age (photos, paintings, graphic works) are miss ing. When the subjects can no longer be recog nized, because faces or significant attributes are missing, additions are sometimes applied. In cases when damage or changes in colour and material (e.g., corrosion, missing details, old conservation measures), disturb the overall im pression of the piece, conservators sometimes opt to stabilize the piece, e.g., by means of retouching. DvD/TaHo

ples of this, such as the 68,000 film negatives at the Saxon State and University Library in Dresden which document life and so ciety in Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden after 1945. According to the project description by the Federal Cultural Foundation, »many of the negatives have already begun to deteriorate a process which today’s technology can neither stop nor reverse and therefore, cannot be preserved in their original form in the long term. Consequently, the project aims to safeguard the photo graphic content.«

...or a culture of breakage?

Cultural or human catastrophes were frequently the lamentable, but inevitable, causes of destruction and loss in the past. In the wake of wars and conquests, huge collections of documents, ar chived specimens and cultural works have been stolen or pil laged. Technical accidents such as that which caused the fire at the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar or the collapse of the His torical Archive in Cologne were also responsible for destroying an incalculable number of original works. In Cologne some peo ple are now discussing the possibility of rebuilding the archive at the same site. Their cynical argument is that there will be plen ty of space for the collection now, since almost 25 percent of it appears to have been lost.

As we lose the battle against time and its destructive effects in more and more areas, and recognize in view of the demo graphic development and the resulting economic forecasts that there is simply not enough money to pay for the necessary personnel, we may have to re-evaluate how we manage the cul tural testimony of the past without such catastrophes. This does not mean Germany would have to relinquish the right to regard itself as a cultural nation.

For example, once the newspaper pages at the Berlin State Li brary are laminated and digitalized, what reason is there for not disposing of the unwieldy folios? Their content would be pre served. Of course, what future researchers will find so important about them is impossible to predict today. But it certainly will not be the brittle wood-pulp paper. And the aura of the original, the feel of flipping through the newspaper, will have been lost anyway as a result of the irreversible lamination in the plastic foil. As it is now, many scientists no longer work with originals, but rather copies and scans. For example, those who wish to study the customer file of the legendary Galerie Thannhauser, located at the Central Archive of the International Art Trade Assoc. in Cologne, can work with a fantastic database. It contains a digital version of the thin, fragile pages and features a magnification tool for easier reading than the original. Around the world, libraries have formed research associations to provide scholars virtual access to their original documents a non-commercial version of Google Books?

Those, who wish to openly discuss the societal option of foster ing a new, peaceful »culture of cultural breakage«, and those who wish to consider how much of the past we will be able to preserve and conserve in the future and what limitations will be necessary, have to be aware of the risks involved with such decisions.

We must remember that the National Socialists believed they were in the position to judge whether cultural assets were worthy or unworthy of preserving. On this basis they justified their decision to physically destroy the cultural works of entire groups of the population primarily those of European Jews. We should ask ourselves who is responsible for making decisions regarding preservation or not, which criteria and limits should apply and how far should we go, for example, with regard to mon uments. There is no real reason why we should continue forcing the public to live with the ugly, monumental, eclectic, functional and representational buildings designed by the Nazis. The Gauforum in Weimar, the Ordensburg Vogelsang in the Eifel Mountains, the Ministry of the Air Force in Berlin all sites that flaunted the power of National Socialism and which mod ern society could well live without. Only a few of them are capa ble of evoking a sustained emotional impact as memorial sites. Although they offer well-meaning memorial concepts, many of the buildings are now being used for completely different pur poses. Two generations later and no surviving contemporary wit nesses on hand, visitors can hardly sense the planned and organ ized crimes that were committed there. Yet there is a completely different feeling when one visits the former concentration camps or the torture cells of the SS , SA and Gestapo. Anyone who stands before the crematorium feels the monstrosity of what happened there. Only the real site can create this impression.

Whoever wishes to initiate a discussion about our archives, li braries and museums must not overlook an entirely irrational as pect of this issue the aura of the original which continues to influence our culture of custodianship and memory. Although the dtv edition is magnificent from a philological point of view, there is no comparison to the yellowed first edition of Else Lasker-Schüler’s poems of love and desire, published by Kurt Wolff and Paul Cassirer, or an original Goethe autograph, an au dio tape by John Cage, or a pocket watch made by Peter Henlein himself. Or those documents which testify to the murder of mil lions of people whose names only exist on paper. In cases such as these, preservation is not a matter of debate it is a necessity.

Stefan

Koldehoff , born in 1967, studied Art History, German Studies and Political Science. He served as acting editor-in-chief of the art magazine ART in Hamburg, and today, is the editor of the cultural programme at Deut schlandfunk in Cologne. In addition to publishing several books and writing for the newspapers Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung , Stefan Koldehoff was awarded the puk prize for excellence in journalism by the German Council of Culture in 2008. He lives with his family in Cologne.

1 Isadora Duncan on the beach near Venice. ca. 1903, photo: Raymond Duncan [C] 2 Dance lesson with Mary Wigman, undated, photographer unknown [C]

rise to the ovation why the planned cit y of zlín is a model of modernit y by regina bittner

Zipp German-Czech Cultural Projects , initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation, examine the relevance of Tomáš Bata’s unique architectural and historical legacy. His legacy is not, as many might assume, the brand name of the once largest shoe manufacturing company in the world, but rather the model city of Zlín. Regina Bittner, cultural scholar and director of the Bauhauskolleg at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, de scribes the ambivalent character of this »radiant phenomenon«, as Corbusier had once described Zlín, from today’s point of view.

Deep in the southern Moravian forests of the Czech Republic lies a small city which had once been famous the world over. It’s the city where Bata shoes were produced a brand name now known around the world. You will find them in the closets of middle-class Indian families, eve ry child in Bangladesh who makes it to college wears his own pair of Bata shoes, and in Toronto, a spacious Bata Shoe Museum has just opened. And in Germany, most people immediately rec ognize the red Bata name even though the number of Bata retailers has dwindled in recent years. Yet the place where it all began Zlín seems to have disappeared off the world map. Zlín is where Tomáš Bata built his shoe factory in 1894, and is one of the few remaining planned cities in Europe today. In the 1920s the entrepreneur made his dream a reality and commis sioned the architect František Lydie Gahura to build a new city far from the centres of the Czech avant-garde of New Building, a city tai lored specifically to the needs and rhythm of production at the factory. Zlín is regarded as the ideal example of functionalistic urban plan ning. Although its attraction is historically dat ed, its significance is by no means outdated. If we take a closer look at modern-day Zlín, which hasn’t produced any new shoes for ages, we dis cover evidence that the city’s ability to survive in the middle of nowhere is also due to its histo ry as a modern utopia.

As Bata’s company expanded, workers from the surrounding rural areas were brought into the city. This led the company’s building depart ment to develop blue- and white-collar worker settlements, all of which were designed using the same basic model bright and visible, steelreinforced concrete frame cubicles (6 15 m × 6 15 m) with red-brick infills and a band of win dows. The company’s intensive construction work transformed Zlín into a modern function al city in the 1920s. Initially developed on the premise of economics, it didn’t take long until modern architectural design was consciously integrated into the corporate philosophy. In 1935 one of the most influential advocates of the functional city, Le Corbusier, publicly expressed his admiration for the shoe city, saying »Zlín is a radiant phenomenon«. The plan to spatially separate basic functions of work, living, recrea

tion and maintenance was put into practice in Zlín even before the Athens Charta of 1933 the most influential manifesto of urban planning of the 20th century. Structural princi ples of industrial production, standardization and rationalization were integrated into the or ganization and design of urban space. For ex ample, the cubic module not only served as the basic element for the company buildings, but also the boarding and elementary schools, hos pitals, community centres and the company de partment store. Bata’s empire quickly expanded to all corners of the world. In England, India, the Netherlands and Brazil, not only will one find Bata shoe stores, but also planned cities, based on the Zlín model.

Zlín’s functional urban design was also influ enced by another significant concept of modern urban planning the garden city. At the end of the 19th century, challenged by overpopulation, air pollution and poor hygienic conditions in large cities, reformers became interested in rec onciling rural and urban lifestyles. There are many references to the garden city concept in Bata’s corporate philosophy. In 1925, the architect Gahura designed an industrial facility which he called The Factory in Green. Bata, who now, in addition to being the city’s largest em ployer, was also the mayor of Zlín, commented on his philosophy in a public presentation of the project: »The free citizen needs space to grow and develop (…). That’s why our new resi dences are spacious and open from all sides. That’s why we want the garden city.« ( 1 ) And this idea was applied in practice in the shoebox-like settlements that stretch across the slopes of the city. The garden city was consciously designed to contrast the modern skyscraper architecture of the day. In fact, Bata adamantly refused to build in a large-block style. The motto Work collectively Live individually was the basis of the architects’ master plan verticallyconstructed buildings surrounded by green and trees, the company headquarters at the centre of the city, encircled by expansive, garden-citylike residential complexes for blue and whitecollar workers.

However, the urban planning concept behind Zlín did not merely adhere to the criteria of ef-

ficient shoe manufacturing. Bata also wanted to create a new kind of human. Because the nonurban socialized New Zlíner were unfamiliar with union representation and personal diversi ty, they ensured the success of Bata’s project. The city of cooperation, as Bata had called Zlín, became a programme for a comprehensive sys tem that promoted worker responsibility and self-initiative. With comparably high wages, a wide range of social benefits and educational programmes, Zlín promised social advance ment for the workers. The implementation of modern management methods, which Bata studied during his travels to America, quickly transformed the company into one of the most successful corporations in Europe. The com munity-based ideology, which centred around work and strongly shaped the city’s educational, recreational and cultural institutions, created the foundation for the systematic synchroniza tion of the city and factory.

With the election of Tomáš Bata as the mayor of Zlín, the boss of the company had acquired complete control over the fate of the city. Small businesses and manufacturers had no chance of establishing themselves in the city if they didn’t have something to do with shoe production. It was no longer possible to separate company ac tivities from certain areas of municipal admin istration. The urban sociologist Annett Stein führer claims that, as a result, Zlín was not a very urban city. It was characterized by a lack of possibilities, diversity and difference. (2 ) And as parts of the old city centre were demolished, Ba ta was able to exercise control over the last social spaces for people to simply hang around. At the same time and this is where the ambiv alence of Zlín lies the shoe manufacturer’s city was a hub of social transformation that of fered possibilities for emancipatory aspiration. Industrial modernization had disintegrated cor porate classifications and eroded antiquated structures. Bata provided wages, bread and edu cation to the rural workers. This strategy offered them opportunities for social advancement, enabled them to escape traditional country life,

and provided the means of self-determination which resulted from the separation of work and leisure in industrial society. The cinema and de partment store, which dominated the new ur ban image of Zlín, were expressions of this new urban space of emancipation. Zlín stood for the future, divided into spaces, a modern place, a training camp for modern people.

The cinema in Zlín boasted one of the largest au ditoriums in the Czechoslovak Republic. Life was completely rationalized in Zlín and modern media played a role in doing this in a variety of ways. Although it was used to control the workers and support the company’s propaganda and advertising efforts, it also provided new spaces for imagination and allowed people to temporarily escape the problems of everyday life. Of course, Bata was aware of the ability to manipulate the masses through cinema. But as the dream machine of modernity, cinemas provid ed an abundance of imagination that surpassed the mundane. Likewise in Zlín, the cinema enabled workers to escape the monotony of the as sembly line and occasionally venture beyond the horizon of the Moravian industrial city.

Zlín’s strategic alliance with the powers of the imagination has continued to this day. Each summer, Zlín hosts the nationally renowned Zlín Film Festival

Even the department store in the new city cen tre is evidence that the new city was not only de signed to discipline, but also promote urban be haviour. The growing middle class developed its own white-collar culture with new needs and desires regarding leisure, consumption and life style. In contrast to cities built around heavy industry, the urban world of consumption was one of the structural principles of Zlín. Al though the city was based on production, the consumption of goods started playing a larger and larger role for the inhabitants of Zlín. The department store, which dominated the new city centre, is one such example of a modern place. In metropolitan cities everywhere, large department stores came to represent modern life. It was no accident, of course, that propo nents of New Building were keen on construct ing new department stores in the 1920s. Bata’s national and international shoe stores were strongly anchored in this tradition, as well. De

partment stores were places of imagination, in which scenarios were presented to the consum ers. They promised a society of abundance with out hardship and constraint.( 3 ) Bata made sure that his assembly-line workers, who predomi nantly came from rural areas, were able to par ticipate in the promises of consumer society. In a sense, the department store functioned like an agency that integrated them into a modern, urbanized society.

Viewed altogether, we recognize that Zlín was a social laboratory, a place where people were both controlled and emancipated. This ambiva lence symbolizes the two faces of modernity. As a city that reflects practically every principle of a planned city, Zlín invites us to re-examine the contradictions of this project of modern ur banism. Because of its focus on the future, we must ask ourselves what we can expect of the city as a spatial model of social co-existence in the future. After many years of post-modern criticism that disparaged the inhospitable char acter of modern urban development, it appears that there is renewed interest in the Tomorrow lands with regard to the artificiality of histori cized urban planning.

This issue was discussed intensively at the inter national conference Utopia of Modernity Zlín , which ZIPP , a programme for Ger man-Czech cultural projects initiated by the Federal Cultural Foundation, hosted together with the House of Art in Brno, the National Gallery in Prague and the Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín from 19 to 23 May 2009. The rediscovery of Zlín in the Czech Republic was part of a wider search in post-socialistic society for models of national, economically successful modernization. In the 1920s Bata’s shoe compa ny was one of the most progressive businesses in the Czechoslovak Republic. Once decried by leftists as a red capitalist, Bata is regard ed as a good entrepreneur today. Until recently Zlín had hardly received mention in the note worthy publications on Czechoslovakian mo dernity. A possible reason for this might be the seemingly strange circumstance that the owner of the largest industrial corporation in the coun try of all people was able to translate the visions and ideals of a predominantly left-wing avant-garde into constructed reality. According

to the architectural critic Jan Sedlak, »the city was a gauntlet, thrown at the feet of the left-wing avant-garde«.(4) Even in socialistic Czechoslo vakia, when Zlín was renamed Gottwaldov after the country’s first communist leader, very little attention was paid to Bata’s legacy after he passed away in 1932 . Even today in an atmos phere strongly influenced by post-1990 neolib eral policymaking, the legacy of Zlín and Bata still remains an obligation. Bata is the good entrepreneur who reconciled capitalism with socialism and thereby built a bridge be tween both societies, the relationship and dif ferences between which continue to dominate everyday life and public debate in the Czech Republic.

There is another good reason to consider Zlín’s modern legacy today. Although one of its pri mary pillars of support has fallen away name ly its shoe production Zlín is not a post-in dustrial wasteland, but an economically vibrant centre of the region. Tomáš Bata’s shoe city has become a dynamic middle-sized city. Since the 1990s people have begun to call Zlín the entrepreneurial city, due to the success of the compa nies headquartered there, which, in the course of the social and economic transformation fol lowing 1990, succeeded in becoming interna tionally competitive. The former factory halls downtown are not vacant, but are home to a number of small businesses.There are now many that have taken the place of the once dominat ing corporation. Strangely enough, the process of massive privatization and market liberaliza tion in the Czech Republic that followed the downfall of the communist system has sparked a dynamic impetus that goes hand-in-hand with Bata’s legacy. But have the new, small-business entrepreneurs succeeded in applying the lessons of modern management which Bata preached to his employees long ago?

The facilities of the former factory are wonder fully suited as party locations; there is no lack of clientele because Zlín is now full of university

(3 ) Uwe Spiekermann, Das Warenhaus . In: Alexa Geisthöv el, Habbo Knoch (eds.), Orte der Moderne Er fahrungswelten des 19 und 20 Jahrhunderts Frankfurt am Main, 2005, p. 211 (4) Quoted by Annett Steinführer, Stadt und Utopie Das Experiment Zlín 1920—1938 . In: Bohemia Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der böh mischen Länder . Band 43 Heft 1 2002 , p. 56

students. With over 10,000 registered students, the Tomáš Bata University, founded in 2001, has made Zlín a leading centre of education in the region. Is there a correlation between the city’s obvious success and its modern legacy? And if so, what can we learn from Zlín? Talking with representatives of the municipal administration and with younger architects, one is amazed at their pragmatic approach to the city. After all, the city was built for the pur pose of efficiently producing shoes, and al though the social circumstances have changed dramatically since then, the city planners con tinued developing the city with this rationale in mind. For example, the newly built residential complexes of the 1960s and 1970s were designed to correspond to the existing buildings of the shoe city. This pragmatism and open-minded ness, which have shaped the organization of the urban spaces in Zlín, represent an opportunity for a young generation of architects to continue writing Zlín’s history, rather than preserve it. Indeed, Zlín was quick to turn down a proposal to apply for UNESCO World Cultural Heritage status, because it would have severely limited the possibilities of developing the city in the fu ture. In the same non-ideological way, urban planners in Zlín discuss preserving (or not) the historic buildings in the city. In view of the con temporary obsession with historic originals and monuments, it’s surprising that a public debate has arisen about why a city, that was only built to last for a certain period of time, should now suddenly be preserved as a monument forever. We get the same impression when strolling through Zlín’s garden city quarters. The worker settlements are lively neighbourhoods today. One might notice that the uniform red-brick cubatures are no longer uniform there are high-class winter gardens, chic roof terraces, purist modernity and the home-sweet-home of the working man. Yet despite these changes, they all possess something very specific to Zlín. Although academic research has long ignored the perspective of social space in this planned city, we notice from the culture, lifestyles and routines of its inhabitants that Zlín has devel oped differently than naturally created historic cities. Zlín’s legacy of progress and change has etched itself into the mentality and minds of its residents.

In this way Zlín’s materialized memory demon strates something very important. We learn that our existing knowledge, assumptions and judge ments, which we believed closed the chapter on urban planning of modern cities of the 20th cen tury, does not correspond to today’s circum stances in this City of Tomorrow. Stand ing at the railing of the roof terrace of Building 21, the former company headquarters, one looks over the city and imagines Manhattan’s canyoned streets. In the worker settlements, there is still the promise of a garden city community, and in front of the cinema, students relax on one of the many municipal greens and drink beer. The contradictory elements of modernity, all of which are concentrated in the space of this small Moravian city, demonstrate that the modern city is far more complex than postmodern critics ever dreamed.

Regina Bittner is a cultural scientist and the di rector of the Bauhaus Kolleg at the Bauhaus Dessau Foun dation. She is currently working on a publication about the urban politics of identity based on the example of the Bau haus city of Dessau.

zlín model city of modernity An exhibition co ordinated by the Architekturmuseum der TU München, the National Gallery in Prague and the Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín. As part of Zipp German-Czech Cul tural Projects, the Federal Cultural Foundation is funding an exhibition at the Pinakothek der Moderne, featur ing the unique development of the southern Moravian city and how it was shaped by the history of the Bata shoe factory. [19 Nov. 2009 21 Feb. 2010]

The exhibition will be accompanied by two publications, published by the JOVIS Verlag: Zlín Modellstadt der Moderne Winfried Nerdinger [ed.] / Brochure / hardcover, 190 pp. with numerous ill., 17 × 24 cm, in German Museum edition: ca. eur (d) 30 / isbn 978-3-86859-103-3 Book store edition: ca. eur (d) 38 / isbn 978-3-86859-051-7 Exhibition publication with architectural-historic essays

A Utopia of Modernity : Zlín Katrin Klingan [ed.] in collaboration with Kerstin Gust / Bro chure, 300 pp. with numerous ill., 17 × 24 cm, in English eur (d) 28 / isbn 978-3-86859-034-0

the audience loves it

a journey to the home games in essen, bautzen, greifswald and oberhausen

by michaela schlagenwerth

Remembering. Things we too often forget. Or things we’d rather not remember. Revitalizing places that have been abandoned. Talking about those who live on the fringe, illegal immigrants and the long-term unemployed. All of these themes are ideal for theatre as long as they remain abstract. But what happens when we turn our attention to real stories on location? Like putting on a play set in your own city about the East German Secret Police (Stasi)? Or performing an opera in a metro station that local resi dents avoid because of a series of rapes that have occurred there? Or salvaging the life of the GDR and transforming it into living memory?

Home Game theatre projects can do this they are serious about making theatre a public place where society can look itself in the mirror and come to understand itself. Home Games get involved, rewrite history and add novelty to familiar places. They can do this because they want to mobilize the residents of their city. Perhaps they rely on the narrative patterns of great dra matic literature, but the stories they tell come from an entirely different theatre of life. Namely right outside their front door. In Bautzen and Greifswald, in Essen and Oberhausen.

The Home Game fund by the Federal Cultural Foundation shouldn’t even be necessary, according to Lutz Hillmann, gener al theatre director of the German-Sorbian Volkstheater in Baut zen. The fund is promoting what all theatres should be striving for anyway becoming more rooted in their region. As it is to day, such local bonds help more and more theatres legitimize their existence and the public subsidies they receive. Theatre can resist the pull of globalisation with individuality and become a place where local identity is formed and fostered. For contempo rary theatre, this is one of the greatest opportunities and most es sential tasks today. You hear this from practically every general theatre director you talk to. Of course, each has his/her own in terpretation of this task and consequently, there’s plenty of room for improvement in their highly self-praised regional root edness. At numerous theatres in Nuremberg, Oberhausen or Greifswald, for instance regional rootedness rarely con sists of more than theatre projects for students, senior citizens, prison inmates or other city residents.

That’s not what a Home Game is. Home Game theatre projects may work with amateurs, but their productions are cer tainly not amateurish. Rather, they’re highly artistic with count less forms, approaches and possibilities, and their flexible character poses a challenge to the structures of the smooth-running theatre business. This in itself is reason enough that such projects cannot be taken for granted. But perhaps the most serious hurdle for theatres is that they lack the necessary experience to engage in such productions. For example, how do they find ap propriate themes and adapt them for use in a theatre perform ance? Or what questions should be asked of whom, and who could develop the idea? Sequestered within their intellectual for tress, many theatre artists consider what goes on outside their doors too mundane to be fitting for the stage. Or they believe

that theatregoers wouldn’t be interested in such topics, or they’d be overwhelmed by them. However, the opposite is true. Audi ences love it when it works. But of course, there’s no guarantee it will.

But it worked in Greifswald. The director Tobias Rausch, an expert on catastrophes, scoured the city in search of them. The outcome was a new play called Schicht C [Shift C] about the catastrophic winter of 1978 /79 when the nuclear power plant in Greifswald-Lubmin, the largest in the former GDR , was cut off from the outside world by a blizzard. Schicht C , however, is not a piece of melodrama, but a vivid portrayal of normal life in the past something that usually can only be achieved effec tively in literature.

»People don’t associate emergencies with patterns of drama,« says Tobias Rausch, »but rather a succession of trivialities.« To devel op Schicht C , Rausch and his team interviewed employees of the power plant who had been cooped up inside during the storm and continued operating the plant, although they desper ately needed sleep. They spoke with the workers who had tried to clear the rails for the train and almost died in the process. They spoke with the families who waited anxiously at home for news about their loved ones on Shift C at the nuclear power plant, and talked to the salespeople at the local store who defended their wares from hoarding consumers.

The team divided these interviews up into tiny fragments and carefully interwove them. This fragmentation of history suddenly became a highly condensed, extremely vibrant memory of life in the former GDR . A memory of how people used to be and how they treated one another. »If you try retelling the large story, it doesn’t work,« Rausch explains. Similar to Marcel Proust’s fa mous madeleines, it was the small, seemingly irrelevant details in the interviews which possessed the nuances and the actual hid den meanings. To reveal these, the team had to take the research seriously and collect information without predilection. »You have to allow for disorientation,« says Rausch. The extreme, the exceptional situation is only a matrix which sharpens the memo ry and makes things clearer. Using the material they collected, Rausch and the actors at the Theater Vorpommern improvised and experimented with what could be incorporated into the rela tionships, where the dynamic moments occur, and things over lap.

This is how Schicht C came about, a funny, poetic and regu larly sold-out play. It’s one approach, one possibility among many. A way for people to talk about their city, their lives and their past. About how they used to be. Anton Nekovar, the gen eral theatre director of the Theater Vorpommern, regards the play as a community works project. »I’m extremely happy that it also became a work of art,« he says. In view of the commitment and hard work that went into it, this statement could easily be misunderstood as if dealing with the history of the city’s in habitants was little more than an educational project to promote a connection to the audience. Actually, it’s a wonderful example of what can be done on stage namely understanding oneself

through the art of acting. It’s the knowledge that this is a different, but exciting, unconventional method of producing art which comes very close to reality.

The situation is different in Bautzen. General theatre director Lutz Hillmann started his first »home game« long before the Home Game fund was initiated by the Federal Cultural Foun dation in 2006. In 2003 Hillmann began a joint project with the director of the Bautzen Memorial, a former prison used by the East German Secret Police (Stasi) which served as the venue for a production of a local »Stasi version« of Romeo and Juliet

The performance did much to improve the reputation of the lo cally unpopular memorial. In recent years, the site has become more of a tourist attraction, and tourism agencies are now men tioning the former prison on the first pages of their brochures. Yet apart from such marketing strategies, how have the inhabit ants of Bautzen and the surrounding region come to terms with their Stasi history?

According to theatre director Hillmann, it was time for an out side perspective, an objective view. Therefore, he engaged two West Germans, the director Martin Kreidt and the dramaturge Christoph Twickel to develop a Home Game project. They went looking for clues in the city, talked with people in the shop ping centres, perused the books at local bookshops, spoke with municipal authorities. What impressed them most was how peo ple glorified the GDR without any consideration of the negative aspects. Though they didn’t deny it, people simply detached the Stasi past from what the GDR meant to them.

Based on their findings, Kreidt and Twickel decided to produce a version of Antigone , as it also deals with resistance, tyranny and alleged reasons of state at a fundamental level. They hotwired the piece with video segments of two East German dissi dents, the historian Thomas Klein and the former punk musi cian Bernd Stracke, both of whom chose not to leave the GDR in hopes of changing things for which they were imprisoned in Bautzen. As they tell their terrible stories of imprisonment and the infiltration of their entire lives by Stasi agents, we see two men who didn’t »betray« the GDR and who can challenge the GDR romanticists more believably than former prisoners who simply wanted to »get across« to the other side.

Throughout the play, the audience encounters a young, friendly and rather naive Chinese girl named Ling. At the beginning she greets the audience and explains that she’s a university student, currently doing an internship. She appears so genuine that we might not even realize that she’s an actress herself. The foreign element in the play with its sometimes absurd views and ques tions, demonstrates the comic potential that arises when two un related stories are told simultaneously. This character achieves what the memorial director Silke Klewin feels is so important the memorial is a place where you also have to laugh, otherwise you cannot open up. Otherwise you stand rigidly at attention at the wall of history or you’re crushed beneath its weight.

Antigone in Bautzen is theatre that touches on the selfimage of its city in a variety of ways. This is exactly what theatre

should do and this production is absolutely aware of that. Hillmann has done much in the city already, but it’s the first time his theatre produced a play based on research on location. Such productions can have an enormous impact. Theatre can raise the significance of local issues, portray them in a different light and set different processes in motion than media reports or university lectures could. Theatre can create momentum and even bring about change. It can enhance the reputation of a re jected Stasi prison memorial, or focus on the often overlooked connection between the Stasi past and today’s hooligans in the former Stasi and current Neo-Nazi stronghold of Berlin-Lich tenberg, as does the play Dynamoland at the Theater an der Parkaue, for example. Home Games allow theatres to make a political impact, shape their towns, highlight relevant issues, and question and perhaps change the self-image of their cities. This is exactly what we mean by rooting a theatre in its city.

In Oberhausen Eberhard Wickum came to theatre via the youth welfare office. He works with young people of immigrant background by providing not welfare but support in the »prophylactic area«, as he calls it. Wickum and the dramaturge Simone Kranz at the Theater Oberhausen jointly developed an interesting, educational theatre project. For the last three seasons the theatre has collaborated with young people from different ethnic backgrounds. Not to segregate them, but rather to focus on the different issues and problems that each ethnic communi ty has. For example, last year’s project focused on five Tamil girls, all of whom go to high school and appear completely integrated, yet have resigned themselves to the fact that their parents will choose their future husbands.

»By using theatre to view their lives,« says Eberhard Wickum, »we give immigrant communities a public forum.« We give them a place in society a place usually used by others. Wickum is con vinced that even if these immigrant groups don’t make it to the theatre, simply knowing that theatre cares about them has an impact. According to the youth worker, the Turkish communi ties are now represented in the Council for Immigrant Affairs in Oberhausen’s municipal government. Even the mosque associa tions are playing a more public role and becoming increasingly involved in local work projects in their city quarters. Of course, there’s still much to do, but the process has started and things are heading in the right direction. However, it’s a different matter with the African communities. Most immigrant families from Africa strongly identify with their church congregations. So far no one has come up with a way of establishing a public forum for exchange. Theatre can play a crucial role in this area. It can forge relationships between worlds which are yet unacquainted with one another. It can create familiarity on both sides. It can tell stories which amaze everyone.

Unfortunately, little of this was realized in this year’s perform ance Klima Talk Oberhausen [Climate Talk. Oberhausen]. The director Neco Çelik obviously didn’t know how to utilize the theatre’s preparatory work. He researched issues of his own. They didn’t lead him into the city and into the African

communities, but rather back into the theatre. Too bad. Both sides should keep this in mind during their preliminary talks are they gung-ho about the project, are they interested in the pro posed theme, does it spark their creativity and desire to investi gate deeper? Despite this year’s flop, the team at Theater Ober hausen isn’t discouraged. It knows that it’s progressing down an exciting path. But it demonstrates how carefully they must select and collaborate with their directors, in whose hands the project’s fate ultimately lies. Regardless of whether the theatre proposes a theme or not, in the end, the directors are the investigators who must, or at least should try to discover what lies hidden beyond one’s backyard. Or as in Greifswald, right in one’s own backyard. In Home Game projects, the directors must master the art of research. Because these projects could never work without solid, intensive research. At the same time, this poses the greatest diffi culty for a Home Game project good research takes time and is expensive. And there’s always a residual risk. Perhaps there are experienced researchers and playwrights on board, but there’s no run-of-the-mill recipe for a successful Home Game produc tion. No one knows what they’ll run into, who they’ll meet and what stories they’ll hear when researching.

Groups like Rimini Protokoll and directors like Tobias Rausch and Martin Kreidt have long developed their own meth ods and approaches. These are artists who are addicted to reality. Matthias Rick is another such artist. Make sure you don’t come by car, he tells me on the phone, take the underground! Matthias Rick is working at the Eichbaum underground station in Essen. As an architect and member of the artists’s group raumlabor berlin, he is an expert for failed utopias of urban development. And the Eichbaum station is the perfect example of such a failed urban utopia a poorly-lit underground station with dark tun nels and stairwells where a series of rapes were committed in the 1980s. Although crime statistics say otherwise, most of the city’s residents still regard Eichbaum as the most dangerous station in Essen and consequently avoid going there. Many shoppers prefer taking long detours than risking the concrete underpasses at Eichbaum. At least until raumlaborberlin came.

Together with Musiktheater im Revier Gelsenkirchen, the Ring lokschuppen Mühlheim and the Schauspiel Essen, raumlaborberlin began a colossal, crazy project at the Eichbaum station, titled Eichbaum Opera . This Home Game project is far more than a mere opera production it’s also an art installa tion.

Raumlaborberlin and its partners worked together on the project for two years. Last year they erected an opera control centre, based on the masons’ guilds of the Middle Ages. This is where the project’s participants met and worked, this is where the dramaturges and composers developed and wrote the libretti and composi tions and where they planned the performances for the three operas together with the director Cordula Däuper. It was also where they and local residents barbecued together, threw parties, held concerts, exhibitions and workshops. Sitting in the shadow of this futuristic, UFO -like opera control centre, you’ll notice the

visitors who have come here simply because they’ve heard this incredible opera story and want to see it firsthand. An older couple arrives by bikes. They, like many others here, want to see this Eichbaum with their own eyes. This Eichbaum, the much talked-about venue of high culture, which was once an ominous place, frequented only by daring teenagers who could spray graffiti, smoke, drink, make out and beat each other up without being bothered. The public transport authorities had long given up improving the surveillance and design of the sta tion.

It’s impossible to make a public space like a underground station simply disappear. The team headed by the raumlaborberlin ac tivists Matthias Rick and Jan Liesegang tried to reinvent the loca tion with a radical alternative programme. They speculated that if they could produce an opera at this inhospitable venue, they’d be able to confront technocratic madness with another form of craziness. »We looked for a form of madness, similar to that of Klaus Kinski’s Fitzcarraldo in Werner Herzog’s film,« says Matthias Rick. »Because that’s what you have to do here lug a ship over a mountain.« In the beginning, the locals along with practically everyone else in the city thought the project was absolute nonsense. Maybe hip hop might be something you could do at a place like Eichbaum but opera? No way. Yet the longer the artists continued working at the opera control centre, the more natural it became for passersby to join the evening bar becues, older people to attend readings at the senior citizens’ café, youngsters to come to the youth parties and everyone to meet at the monthly get-togethers at the opera bar. And the grander and crazier the project became. Because it became more of a real ity by the day. A reality that was »not normal« for this place. The Eichbaum Opera produced three world premieres Entgleisung Eine Kammeroper [Derailment. A Cham ber Opera], Simon der Erwählte [Simon the Chosen] and Fünfzehn Minuten Gedränge [Fifteen Minutes of Shov ing]. The success of the project surprised everyone who had not seen Eichbaum or the opera performances. It was a mixture of admiration and astonishment, because theatre had been able to transform a neglected place into a cultural venue and rewrite its history. This success hovers over Eichbaum like a pink cloud a Home Game cloud and it surely won’t dissipate anytime soon. Perhaps this is truly the beginning of something new. We’ll have to see. Maybe someone will have finally opened that organ ic food stand the dream of an unemployed resident in one of the operas. That would also be a home game. Of a different kind.

Michaela Schlagenwerth , theatre scholar and freelance journal ist, lives in Berlin.

For an overview of all the Home Game projects and information on funding opportunities, visit www.kulturstiftung-bund.de/heimspiel [The next project application deadline is 31 March 2010 ]

new music network to cooperate with the television forum 2010 This four-year funding programme has almost reached the halfway mark. The 15 New Music Network projects have experimented with new formats in over 800 events, initiated event series and festi vals and contributed to cultural education in the area of New Music with innovative educa tional projects. The Berlin office, which coordi nates the organization and content of the 15 projects, is working to present a new quality of edu cation and performance of New Music to the public. In 2010 the New Music Network will cooperate with the 6 th Television Forum for Music in Bremen (10 13 March). Titled The Look of the Sound , directors, event managers, representatives of public broadcast ing companies, composers and musicians will discuss how the contemporary culture of New Music and the mass medium of television inter sect, and how new sounds can generate new im ages, and thereby reach larger audiences. To ob tain more information and the events calendar, visit: www.netzwerkneuemusik.de

documentary on an instrument for every child Children, parents and teachers are the main characters in Oliver Rauch’s documentary An Instrument for Every Child — The Film . The director Rauch, cam eraman Boris Becker and his film team have been visiting primary schools in the Ruhr re gion since February 2009 to observe how firstto fourth-grade children are discovering the world of music, learning instruments and per forming music together for the time. The documentary, produced by SUR Films, has been made possible in cooperation with the WDR broadcasting company and will likely be shown at cinemas starting in 2010 when the Ruhr re gion becomes the European Capital of Culture. The film is sponsored by the Filmförderungsanstalt FFA , the Film Foundation NRW and the German Federal Film Fund. For more informa tion, visit: www.jeki-derfilm.de

an instrument for every child work shops to develop teaching standards for playing the bag˘lama (turkish lute) From September 2009 to June 2010, the Instru ment for Every Child Foundation will collabo rate with the NRW KULTUR sekretariat Wuppertal and the NRW State Association of Music Schools in hosting a round table for bag˘lama instructors. The goal of the event series is to de velop teaching standards and concepts for An Instrument for Every Child , and in particular, instruction methods for the bag˘lama. The first official meeting with 28 teachers took place on 2 June 2009. Together with the musicologist Dr. Martin Greve from the Uni versity of Rotterdam, the teachers will work on developing concrete learning concepts in sever al workshops beginning this autumn. www.jedemkind.de

celebrating world cinema The Federal Cultural Foundation and the Berlin International Film Festival will commemorate the fifth anniversary of the World Cinema Fund (WCF ) in 2009 with a three-day film series in Berlin. Since it was established in 2004, the WCF

has financed the production or distribution of 63 films from 29 countries around the world. The artistic merit of the films funded by the WCF has been distinguished with outstanding film festival awards most recently the Gold en Bear for the feature film The Milk of Sorrow (Claudia Llosa, Peru). The three-day film series will look back at the excellent films of world cinema which were made possible through the WCF. The featured films include works from Uruguay, Argentina and Israel countries which produce wonderful films that rarely make it to German cinemas. The film se ries will be shown in the Hackesche Höfe in Berlin from Wednesday to Saturday, 4 7 No vember 2009. For more information about the World Cinema Fund, visit: www.berlinale.de

prize for thomas heise’s documenta ry material Thomas Heise’s documentary Material , funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, has been awarded the Grand Prix de la Compétition Internation ale 2009 at the International Documentary Film Festival Marseille FID. In the film, Heise, who was born in East Berlin in 1955, presents his personal view of German history based on his experiences while growing up in the former GDR . He pieced together unpublished audio and video material, which he recorded and gath ered over the past thirty years, and created a very personal, historic panorama unlike the official images of history. Material has been invited to numerous European festivals, including the Viennale in Vienna and the Festival dei Populi in Florence, where audiences will have the chance to watch a Heise retrospective in November 2009 ARTE will broadcast the retro spective on 8 November at 11:40 pm.

www.heise-film.de

film series winter adé films pres aging the fall of the wall is extended by popular demand In response to popu lar demand, the Federal Cultural Foundation has agreed to extend the tour of the film series Winter Adé — Films Presaging the Fall of the Wall , which it organized in co operation with the Deutsche Kinemathek. The commemorative year tour will now run until the end of 2010. Since the series began in Febru ary 2009, the film programme has been shown in 24 cities throughout Germany. It is comprised of 15 full-length programmes featuring German and Eastern European films which hint at the far-reaching changes about to take place. The collection of feature, documentary, animation, short and experimental films include some by famous names in film history and works by less er known filmmakers, as well. Winter Adé is also accompanied by a brochure with explana tory texts about each film. Cinemas and event organizers can borrow the films from the Stif tung Deutsche Kinemathek free of charge until December 2010. For more information and a presentation schedule, visit: www.deutsche-kin emathek.de

the history of video art part two of 40yearsvideoart.de After its successful launch at the Center for Art and Media Tech nology in Karlsruhe in summer 2009, the exhi

bition RECORD > AGAIN ! — 40yearsvide oart.de will go on tour to exhibition venues in Aachen, Dresden and Oldenburg. The sec ond part of the project like the first was funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation and carried out at the ZKM laboratory for anti quated video systems. The ZKM maintains a collection of functioning historic equipment, with which over 50 video formats from the 1960s to the 1980s were restored, digitally re-mastered and preserved for future generations. The project features works by Joseph Beuys, Wolfgang Stoerchle, Dieter Roth, the group Telewissen, Wolf Kahlen and Michael Morgner. Exhibi tions: Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst Aachen, 19 Sept.— 15 Nov. 2009 ; Kunsthaus Dresden Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art, 29 Nov. 2009 14 Feb. 2010 ; Edith Russ Site in Oldenburg, 27 Feb.— 25 Apr. 2010. The 420 -page catalogue, published by the Hatje Cantz Verlag, features texts by Siegfried Zielinski, Peter Weibel, Klaus Staeck, Claus Löser, Walter Grasskamp, René Block and Christoph Blase. A DVD study edition will be released this autumn for sale ex clusively to institutions for non-public teaching and research purposes. The Goethe-Institut is responsible for the international promotion of the project. For more information, visit: www.record-again.de

shortcut europe 2010 cultural strategies and social exclusion european congress in dortmund from 3 5 june 2010 Is it possible for everyone to participate in culture? Are there cultural strategies to counter social exclusion? These are key questions which the Socio-Cultural Fund will address during a European congress that will take place in Dort mund in June 2010 as one of the European Capital of Culture Ruhr 2010 events. The con gress will be supported in part by the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Cultural Policy Society and other partners. Sociocultural centres and protagonists from all around Europe are invited to discuss the theory, praxis, situations and perspectives of socio-culture in Europe, share information and network with one anoth er. The Socio-Cultural Fund’s decision to hold the congress comes in response to an EU initia tive to examine issues of social inclusion in 2010 More information: Cultural Policy Society, Tel. +49 ( 0 ) 228 20167 35 www.kupoge.de

good dance plan news from berlin The Dance Plan has announced the launch of a four-year pilot project called the Interdisciplinary University Centre of Dance Pilot Project Dance Plan Berlin a completely new educational insti tution of dance and choreography, which the Dance Plan Germany will fund with over 1 million euro until 2010. Representatives from the universities of Berlin, the mayor of Berlin and the senators for education, science and re search came to an agreement on the key points of the new university contracts between 2010 and 2013 before the summer recess. The final ized version of the contracts also includes an agreement to continue the operation of the Inter disciplinary University Centre of Dance. This will allow the university to admit new students to bachelor’s and master’s degree programmes

starting in 2010. The financial guarantee for this ambitious project is yet another important step toward creating sustainable structures for dance in Germany. www.tanzplan-deutschland.de

dance plan germany cultural heritage of dance In spring 2007 the Dance Plan Germany initiated and mediated the merger of five leading dance documentation centres in Berlin, Bremen, Cologne and Leipzig into the Association of German Dance Ar chives (VDT ). The association develops strat egies to help the cultural heritage of dance gain more recognition and respect at the political level and in the media. It is currently creating an online portal to enable researchers, teachers, in ternational cultural organizations and cultural education projects to gain access to sources and documents of German dance productions, from Mary Wigman to William Forsythe, from Dres den-Hellerau to Essen-Werden. As the activities of the association continue and intensify, addi tional archives, museums and cultural organi zations intend to join the association in the near future. www.tanzarchive.de

new release empirical approach to dance in schools The Dance Plan Ger many funds a total of eight different dancerelated publications in Germany. One of these was a report, released in August 2009, by the Working Group for the Evaluation and Research of the National Association of Dance in Schools. The goal of the publication is to support the nu merous practical projects by dancers, dance ed ucators and choreographers with educational theory and anchor them in cultural policy. In addition to a first-ever national review of dance in schools, the book also includes articles with a methodological focus on the observation and analysis of dance, and others which present vari ous approaches in evaluation and impact re search in dance. The publication targets dance scholars, teachers, dance educators, choreogra phers and those who are interested in the socioscientific and cultural political fields.

Empirische Annäherungen an Tanz in Schu len : Befunde aus Evaluation und Forschung Working Group for the Evaluation and Research of the Na tional Association of Dance in Schools, ed., Athena Verlag, 1st edition 2009, ISBN 978 3 89896359 6. Available in book stores for 14 50 euro.

projects

new projects At its joint session in spring 2009, the Foundation’s jury recommend ed application-based project funding for 40 new projects from all artistic areas.

Sighard Gille, Bernhard Heisig, Karl-Georg Hirsch, Wolf gang Mattheuer, Rolf Münzner, Evelyn Richter, Arno Rink , Annette Schröter, Volker Stelzmann, Günter Thiele, Werner Tübke, Elisabeth Voigt and others / Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, opening: 3 October 2009, exhi bition period: 4 Oct. 2009 10 Jan. 2010 www.mdbk.de

image and space

60 - 40 -20 art in leipzig 1949 2009 Leip zig was a centre of the fine arts in former East Germany. Following the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, an unparalleled art boom began which made the works of the Leipzig School internation ally renowned and coveted by collectors. This exhibition views the development of the fine arts in Leipzig between 1949 and 2009 and com pares the legend with the reality of the Art of Leipzig. The exhibition starts with the found ing of East and West Germany in 1949. The po litical division of Germany resulted in disparate artistic positions in East and West, especially in terms of artistic freedom and social responsi bility. Even the Leipzig College of Graphic De sign and Book Art saw its task as promoting »realistic art that people can understand«, yet allowed its artists to exercise a certain degree of freedom within socialistic realism. Artists from Leipzig began attracting attention on the Euro pean stage in the 1970s. In 1977 several of them were invited to the documenta VI in Kassel (Bernhard Heisig, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Werner Tübke) and to the Venice Biennial in 1984. Al though the events of 1989 abruptly changed ar tistic production conditions in East Germany, Leipzig aesthetics continued to develop and draw international acclaim of incredible magnitude. In addition to displaying paintings, graphic works and photography from the past 60 years, the curators intend to reconstruct the original GDR Art room at the documenta VI . The exhibition will also examine the commercial and artistic development of the art scene after 1989, which made alternative exhibition venues financially viable, e.g., the former neigh bourhood artists’ collective Galerie Eigen+Art which has grown into an international art trad ing company. 60 40 20 wishes to highlight the cultural history of Leipzig on the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the city’s university.

Curators: Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Hans-Werner Schmidt, Richard Hüttel, Paul Kaiser, Dietulf Sander, Jeannette Stoschek Constanze Treuner /Artists: Hartwig Ebersbach

entre deux actes loge de comédi enne exhibition, symposium, lectures, films, educational events The fixtures and mirrored objects created by the French de signer, interior designer and artist Janette Laverrière play a significant role in the history of French design. Laverrière began working with new types of materials very early in her career and developed her own vision of modernity based on the repertoire of forms developed by the Bauhaus. In celebration of its own 100th an niversary and in commemoration of the artist’s 100th birthday, the Staatliche Kunsthalle BadenBaden will present an exhibition that explores the relationship of art and design. The historic starting point and focus of the exhibition will be Entre deux actes an installation cre ated in 1947 by the grande dame of modern design, who is still largely unknown in Germany. Together with Laverrière’s installation, the exhibition will feature eight room installations by internationally renowned artists, some of which will be reconstructed especially for this show such as those by Fischli&Weiss, Franz West and Tobias Rehberger. All the pieces dem onstrate the thrilling and dynamic relationship between design and interior design in the past 50 years. An extensive event programme with lec tures and an international symposium will ac company the exhibition, along with a film and extensive educational programme for children. Artistic director: Karola Kraus / Artists: Janette Laverrière ( FR , Richard Artschwager US ) , Nairy Baghramian ( IR ) , Marc Camille Chaimovicz ( FR ) , Fischli&Weiss ( CH ) , Martin Kippen berger, Meuser, Carlo Molino ( IT , Claes Oldenburg ( SE ) , To bias Rehberger, Cosima von Bonin, Franz West ( AT , Heimo Zobernig ( AT ) and others / Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 24 July 11 Oct. 2009 www.kunsthalle-baden-baden.de

not with us! art and alternative culture in dresden before and after 1989 Not with us ! examines the defiant alternative culture of the GDR . It focuses on the artists and their works that were produced in or refer to Dresden a city known for its independent art scene. An exhibition, lectures, workshops, vid eo and film presentations and discussion events offer examples of the forms of artistic retreat and action that created an alternative, non-con formist culture within the socialistic state. In the 1980s groups like the Autoperforationsar tisten (Micha Brendel, Else Gabriel, Via Lewandowsky, Rainer Görß) attracted a great deal of attention to Dresden’s counter-culture. In per formances, installations and process art, they integrated organic material or used their own bodies to express their rejection of the East Ger man art industry. The history of non-conform ist art began in the formative years of the GDR and continued after 1989, for example, in Cor nelia Schleime’s works from 1993 that deal with her own Stasi files. Not with us ! also presents contemporary works by younger artists that refer to this alternative culture in the GDR or, looking back at the GDR , investigate the art-

ist’s relationship to society and its institutions. Curators: Frank Eckhardt and Paul Kaiser / Writers: Susanne Altmann, Frank Eckhardt , Eckhart Gillen, Paul Kaiser, Ralf Kerbach, Gwendolin Kremer, Rolf Lindner, Klaus Michael, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Cornelia Schleime, An gelika Weißbach / Artists: David Adam, Peter Bauer, Jürgen Bötcher / Strawalde Micha Brendel Jan Brokof David Buob, Stefanie Busch, Lutz Dammbeck , Else Gabriel, Rainer Görß, Eberhard Göschel, Peter Graf, Angela Ham pel, Günter Hornig, Petra Kasten, Martin Krenn, Thomas Kupsch, Helge Leiberg, Via Lewandowsky, Rupprecht Matthies, Antje Schiffers, Wolfgang Smy, Florian Zeyfang and others / Exhibition, lectures and workshops: 24 Sept. 2009—17 Jan. 2010 ; congress: 14—16 Jan. 2010 ; conference: 18—22 Nov. 2009 ; symposium: 12—14 Nov. 2009 www.webseite.riesa-efau.de

thomas demand. national gallery ac companying exhibition programme Thomas Demand (born in 1964) is not only a photographer, but also a self-proclaimed illu sionist and a reproducer of media. His photography portrays political or social scenes which have become well-known through news paper and television coverage. Demand’s works do not depict the original scenes, but rather life-sized models which the artist recon structs out of cardboard and paper and then photographs. He removes all traces and portrayals of people from the scene which gave rise to its publication in the first place. What remains are phantom images resembling crime scenes which we somehow recognize, but are unable to place. The solo exhibition Nation al Gallery focuses on one particular theme in Demand’s works photography of German historic events since 1945. The exhibition me thodically and systematically examines our im age of Germany on the basis of iconic scenes from the past 60 years. This historic panorama provides material for a comprehensive accom panying programme which the Federal Cultural Foundation has agreed to finance as part of the exhibition. The event series How German Is It ? will feature well-known individuals from the fields of politics, science, research and me dia, such as Peter Esterházy, Hans-Jürgen Syber berg, Jacques Rancière and Rem Koolhaas. In their lectures, podium discussions and readings, the focus on Demand’s works will shed light on significant developments in German society.

Artistic director: Udo Kittelmann / Artist: Thomas Demand / New National Gallery, Berlin 18 Sept. 2009 17 Jan. 2010 www.hv.spk-berlin.de

art for millions 100 sculptures from the maoist period While the Frankfurt Book Fair showcases literature from China in 2009, the Schirn Kunsthalle will present a unique artwork dating back to the Chinese counter-revolution the Rent Collection Courtyard ( Zhouyuan ). This monumental group of 100 life-sized sculptures depicts scenes from the lives of Chinese rural inhabitants, their oppression and exploitation prior to the com munist revolution. Created in 1965, the sculp tures were first displayed at the Szechuan Art Academy and were originally intended to be an installation at a former landlord’s residence (Liu Wencai, 1881 1949 ). Shortly after they were made, however, the Chinese government declared the group of sculptures a national model art work

and had numerous copies and variations pro duced which were presented throughout China and other communist countries abroad. As an icon of Chinese collective memory, the group of sculptures became one of the most important works of contemporary Chinese art. Even be yond China’s borders, the work became a model of revolutionary art production. Today, only one mobile ensemble of this important work from the Maoist period exists, which will be shown in Europe for the first time at the Frank furt exhibition. Zhouyuan is not only inte gral for understanding Chinese culture of the 20th century, but also Chinese contemporary art. For example, the artist Cai Guo-Qiang made reference to Zhouyuan in his piece Rent Collection Courtyard at the Venice Biennial in 1999 ; the work sparked a debate about the position of the artist and the freedom of art in modern-day China. The planned docu mentation describing the creation and recep tion of the work group will also include interpre tations of the work by contemporary Chinese artists. The project also plans on producing an educational museum brochure for school chil dren and offering an accompanying programme with lectures, discussions and film presenta tions.

Curators: Esther Schlicht in cooperation with Feng Bin ( CA ) / Artists: Working artists’ group supervised by teachers and graduates of the Szechuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chong qing, China / Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (Main), 24 Sept. 2009 3 Jan. 2010 www.schirn-kunsthalle.de

polonia in the concentration camp. the persecution of the polish minori ty in germany from 1939 to 1945 exhibition at the former concentration camps sachsenhausen and ravensbrück After Germany attacked Poland on 1 September 1939, the Nazi regime intensified its persecution of the organized Polish minority in Germany. Branded as enemies of the state and potential agitators, the officials and activists in Polish organizations like the Union of Poles were among the first victims of the war in the Third Reich. All Polish organizations were banned and stripped of their assets. Up to 2 ,000 activists were arrested by the Gestapo and de ported to concentration camps, primarily to Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, but some to Buchenwald, as well. On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the attack on Poland and the beginning of World War II , this bilingual exhi bition, jointly created by German and Polish re searchers, will present photographs, documents and original items that shed light on the fate of the prisoners. After opening at the Sachsen hausen Memorial, the exhibition will go on tour to several Polish and German cities. Many peo ple in Germany today and also in Poland are unaware of the suffering the Polish minority endured in the Third Reich. The persecution of the officials of the Polish minority is one of the desiderata of historic research on concentration camps. Consequently, this planned exhibition hopes to break new ground and provide impetus for further German-Polish research, as well as increase the awareness of the history of Poles in Germany.

Curator: Sebastian Nagel / Oranienburg, Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen, 15 Sept. 2009 28 Feb. 2010 ; addi

tional venues: Haus der Polonia Bochum, Topography of Terrors Berlin, castle of Posen, University of Grünberg, Oppelner Museum, Breslau city hall, castle of Stettin / Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten www.stiftung-bg.de

where’s the wind if it doesn’t blow? political picture stories The invention of the printing press not only led to the mass distri bution of texts and images, but also the develop ment of the picture-story genre that dealt with popular, secular topics. Illustrated political fly ers contributed significantly to the democ ratization of knowledge. By the time daily newspapers emerged as a mass medium, these picture stories, such as the German illustrated broadsheets, appealed to the entire population. The Hamburger Kunstverein will hold an exhi bition which, for the first time, presents picture stories from the last several centuries from Eu rope, Japan, the United States and Iran. In se lecting works for the exhibition, the curator Flo rian Waldvogel focused on picture stories with political themes. The exhibition will reveal the conditions under which picture stories were produced and received. Narrative and educa tional elements will explain their socio-political function regardless of how much visitors al ready know about art history. This democratic gesture will also be reflected in the design of the exhibition with an art educational emphasis on the history of images. The accompanying publi cation (designed as an illustrated broad sheet), a lecture series, discussions, seminars and work shops are sure to appeal to a large audience. Curator: Florian Waldvogel / Curatorial staff: Michael Asher ( US , Scott McCloud US , Christoph Steinegger AT / Artists: Albrecht Dürer / Art Spiegelman ( US , Rube Goldberg US / Vernon Green ( US , Hokusai ( J / Golo (Guy Nadeau) ( F , Fran cisco de Goya ( E / Jake and Dinos Chapman GB ) , Hans Hol bein / Martin Arnold ( A ) , Jörg Immendorff / Jules Feiffer ( US ) , Henry Moore ( GB / Joe Sacco US ) , Richard Felton Outcault US / Raymond Pettibon US ) , Alfred Rethel / Grayson Perry ( GB ) Thomas Rowlandson GB / Marjane Satrapi ( IR and others / Kunstverein Hamburg, 12 Dec. 2009 14 Mar. 2010 / Kunstverein Hamburg www.kunstverein.de

eating the universe the art of eating Eat Art is a genre of the fine arts, partially or completely comprised of edible materials. The genre originated in Düsseldorf in 1970 when the Swiss object artist Daniel Spoerri opened the Eat Art Gallery there. With his concept of edible art, Spoerri wanted to radically redirect artis tic reflection to matters of practical life, in par ticular, food and eating. As a result, Spoerri’s use of food expanded the definition of art to a spectacular degree. Many of his works expressed socially critical positions, condemning abun dance and waste as drawbacks of affluence in a consumer society. Transience became a central theme and characteristic feature of his pieces. This exhibition examines the beginnings and development of Eat Art. Reviewing a wide range of artworks, it investigates how the themes of Eat Art are depicted in works by a younger generation of international artists who have in creasingly returned to edible materials since the 1990s in pictures, sculptures, installations, performances and actions. Against the back ground of current social developments, the ar tistic dialogue between these older and newer

artworks will initiate a re-examination and dis cussion of the themes of Eat Art. The exhibition curator Renate Buschmann together with Dan iel Spoerri also emphasize the social topicality of food in the exhibition such as identityforming eating habits, modern dietetics, cook ery shows, and criticism of consumption and globalisation in connection to modern food production.

Curator: Magdalena Holzhey / Assistant curator: Renate Buschmann /Artists: Sonja Alhäuser, BBB Johannes Deim ling, Joseph Beuys, Christine Bernhard, Michel Blazy ( F ) , John Bock , Paul McCarthy US , Arpad Dobriban ( H ) , Anya Gallacio ( GB ) , Carsten Höller, Christian Jankowski, Elke Krystufek A , Peter Kubelka ( A ) , Gordon Matta-Clark US ) , Tony Morgan ( GB ) L A . Raeven NL Thomas Rentmeister Zeger Reyers NL Dieter Roth Mika Rottenberg ( US ) Shimabuku JP , Daniel Spoerri CH ) , Jana Sterbak ( CN/CZ , Andreas Wegner and others / Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 28 Nov. 2009 28 Feb. 2010 ; Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, 16 Apr. 30 June 2010 ; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Sept. 2010 —Jan. 2011 www.kunsthalle-duesseldorf.de

the future of tradition the tradition of the future exhibition commemorating »masterpieces of muhammadan art« in munich 100 years ago The Mu nich exhibition Masterpieces of Muham madan Art in 1910 presented a wide range of Arabic-Islamic visual culture. This pioneering exhibition placed each individual object in its art-historic context and established a new stand ard for the reception and research of Arabic-Is lamic art in the Western world. A hundred years later in 2010, several institutions in Munich are collaborating on a project titled Changing Views comprised of various exhibitions com memorating this anniversary. The Federal Cul tural Foundation is funding the presentation at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The Haus der Kunst will display a selection of those famous exhibitions of 1910 and draw parallels to works by pioneering artists of Western modernity who were inspired by that impressive exhibition. Contemporary artists from Islamic cultural cir cles have also been invited to the Haus der Kunst to display and discuss their current paintings, sculptures, drawings, architecture, film and photography. The curators hope this exhibition will be just as successful as the exhibition of 1910 at initiating a public discussion about contem porary Arabic-Islamic art.

Curators: Chris Dercon León Krempel and Avinoam Shalem / Artists: Abdel-Halim Ibrahim Abdel-Halim ( EG ) Akram Zaatari ( LB , Arab Image Foundation LB , Bassam el Baroni EG ) , Bidoun US ) , Buthina Canaan Khoury ( PS , Dar Onboz ( LB ) , Doa Aly ( EG ) , Hassan Fathy ( EG , Ibrahim El Salahi ( SD ) , Jalal Toufic ( LB , Khatt Foundation ( AE ) , Nasreen Mohamedi IN , Wafa Hourani PS ) , and others / Haus der Kunst München, 17 Sept. 2010 9 Jan. 2011 www.hausderkunst.de

absalon The Israeli artist Absalon, who died in 1993 at the age of 28, produced an oeuvre of extraordinary complexity and unusual uni formity during his short life. Now for the first time, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art will show an extensive solo exhibition of works by this impressive artist. In his pieces, Absalon creates spaces in a systematic manner, using un conventional arrangements and principles of selection and classification which challenge tra ditional concepts of use and function. In his

words, »nothing forces us to make a chair look like a chair.« Absalon gained recognition be yond art circles with his work group Cellules which he began in 1992 . These small cells re semble architectural models or prototypes of living units. Designed in basic geometric forms of circles, squares and rectangles, these 4 to 8 -m 2 rooms include all the necessities of life kitch en, bath, place to sleep, Spartan furniture made of wood or plasterboard and everything painted sparkling white. His use of form is reminiscent to that of architectural modernity, the Bauhaus, de Stijl and Le Corbusier. The focus on absolute necessity, ascetic design and functional arrange ment with smooth surfaces and white walls offer the inhabitants neither diversion nor dis traction, but rather makes them more aware of themselves. Absalon described his cells as »my inner mirror« and as mental spaces. He had planned to display the six completed miniature flats in six different cities around the world. Al though Absalon did not intend his works to be regarded as models of social utopia, they con tinue to fascinate us today for their forwardlooking quality and can be interpreted as a so cio-critical, artistic commentary on global mo bility and the relationship of privacy, public ex posure and identity.

Curator: Susanne Pfeffer / Artist: Absalon IL ) / KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 25 Sept.— 5 Dec. 2010 www.kw-berlin.de

al halqa the circles of the last magh reb storytellers a kinetic room sculp ture Djemaa el-Fna is a marketplace in Marra kesh filled with dance, song, stories, acrobatics, magic tricks and fortune-telling. The onlookers gather in so-called halqas, or circles, around the performers and storytellers to admire their art istry and skill. The UNESCO placed this loca tion on its list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. The interactive walk-in room sculpture by Thomas Ladenburger and Hannes Nehls attempts to re construct this unique location with the aid of projectors, light, film and acoustics. The ubiqui tous tradition of oral storytelling is hardly culti vated anymore in Central Europe and has prob ably never possessed the performative energy that radiates from Djemaa el-Fna. This installa tion will go on display in Berlin and Paris.

Artistic directors: Thomas Ladenburger, Hannes Nehls / Par ticipants: Elfi Mikesch AT ) Mohamed Hassan El-Joundi ( MA Mathew Karau ( US ) / House of World Cultures, Berlin, Feb. —Mar. 2011 ; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, Sept. 2011 / Thomas Ladenburger Filmproduktion www.alhalqa.com

the other leipzig school — photography in the gdr In contrast to the official im ages propagated by the East German regime, the photographic works by instructors and students of the College of Graphic Design and Book Art ( HGB ) in Leipzig provide a glimpse of what so cial conditions were truly like in the GDR . As the only school of photography in East Germa ny, the HGB continued the social documentary tradition of the 19th and 20th century and particularly emphasized photography of the work world and everyday life. With their veristic and often melancholy images, photographers like Arno Fischer, Evelyn Richter, Wolfgang G. Schröter and Helfried Strauß founded their

own Leipzig School a reference to the famous Leipzig School of Painting which ap plied highly subjective imagery to portray a dif ferent side of real-life socialism than suggested by the official propaganda. The photographic works demonstrate ex negativo how little the SED ’s image of socialistic realism corresponded to real life. The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Er furt represents an important photo-artistic con tribution to the social and psychological history of the GDR and, as the 2009 commemorative year concludes, fills in one of the last gaps in our knowledge of the critical art-historical positions in the other Germany.

Curator: Kai Uwe Schierz / Artists: Arno Fischer, Evelyn Richter Wolfgang G. Schröter Helfried Strauß Tina Bara Klaus Elle Matthias Hoch Ute Mahler Werner Mahler Jens Rötzsch, Erasmus Schröter, Gundula Schulze el Dowy, Thomas Steinert and others / Kunsthalle Erfurt, 6 Dec. 2009 31 Jan. 2010 www.kunsthalle-erfurt.de

lawrence of arabia the making of a legend Thomas Edward Lawrence was one of the key figures who rendered outstanding serv ices in the Arabian rebellion against the Otto man Empire. However, he only became a legend with the release of David Lean’s film Law rence of Arabia in 1962. Between these two poles the historic figure and the film legend lies the fascinating mythos of a modern hero who tragically fails in his ambition to help the Arabs gain independence from the colonial powers. Directed by the curator Detlef Hoff mann, the exhibition will be based on two pools of material the photos Lawrence took during his travels and the artistic works he completed for his international best-selling autobiography The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926 ). The goal is to present a multi-facetted image of Lawrence of Arabia as an exceptional figure of contemporary history and an idealized, mod ern-day media legend.

Project director: Mamoun Fasan / Curator: Detlef Hoffmann / Artistic advisor: Rainer Wittenborn / Landesmuseum für Natur und Mensch, Oldenburg, Oct. 2010 —Feb. 2011 ; Rau tenstrauch-Jost-Museum, Cologne, Apr.—Aug. 2011 www.naturundmensch.de

rip it up and start again This exhibition is the third of an exhibition triad by the Kunstverein München which has increased the public awareness concerning the mechanisms of exclu sion in the art market. Following exhibitions on queer identity politics and the British post-punkera, the third exhibition features five New York artists who have been largely ignored by the art market and are practically unknown to the general public. William S. Burroughs, Charles Henri Ford, Ray Johnson, Arthur Russel and Philippe Thomas have received little attention in art-historical discussion, even though they all produced an oeuvre of formidable size. As art-market outsiders, they sometimes enjoyed cult status in New York. Today these artists are regarded as leading pioneers of contemporary Visual Cultural Studies. Based on a selection of works, the exhibition curator Stefan Kalmár will demonstrate the dialectic between subcul ture and the art industry by demonstrating how these outsiders influenced international con temporary trends with their artistic positions. The exhibition will also analyze the mecha

nisms of the operating system of art which determines the artists’ success or failure. The exhibition and accompanying film pro gramme and public lectures will introduce the five New York artists to a wider audience in Ger many. After its presentation in Munich, the ex hibition will go on display at the Artists Space in New York.

Artistic director: Stefan Kalmár / Artists: Arthur Russel, Ray Johnson, Charles Henri Ford, Philippe Thomas, William S. Burroughs, AA Bronson (General Idea) , James Thomas, John Giorno all US , Christopher Müller / Kunstverein München, 10 Oct.— 29 Dec. 2009 ; Artists Space, New York, 10 Apr.— 16 May 2010 www.kunstverein-muenchen.de

don’t cry for me argentina artistic po sitions from 1960 to the present The art of the 1960s and 1970s is a key reference point for the Argentinean contemporary art scene. The international 68er movement and massive repres sion by the military dictatorship during these decades helped established Argentinean art as an important medium for social criticism and political commentary. This exhibition in Berlin presents outstanding positions of Argentinean art from the late sixties to the present and fol lows the development of staunchly socio-criti cal artwork. The goal is to discuss and re-evalu ate the political and socially critical potential of artistic production. And in looking back, the exhibition will enable viewers to distinguish parallels between European developments and those in Latin America. The art of the 1960s and 1970s is becoming increasingly influential for positioning contemporary art production in both regions of the world. Two hundred years after the Argentineans declared independence, the exhibition and its accompanying trilingual publication will redirect Europe’s attention to the historic parallels of artistic production in a country that many had almost forgotten.

Artistic directors: Udo Kittelmann, Heike van den Valentyn, Cristina Sommer ( AR ) / Artists: Oscar Bony, Marcelo Brod sky Nicola Costantino León Ferrari Lucio Fontana Gabriela Golder, Norberto Goméz, Víktor Grippo, Alber to Heredia, Guillermo Kuitca, Jorge Macchi, Fabián Mar caccio, Charly Nijensohn, Cristina Piffer, Juan Carlos Romero, Graciela Sacco all AR / Hamburger Bahnhof, Mu seum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 10 Sept. 2010 9 Jan. 2011 / Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz www.hamburgerbahnhof.de

the potosí principle conference, edu cational programme, publication Co lonial Latin America not only exported raw materials to Europe, but also images both real and conceptual. In commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the independence move ment in Latin America, the House of World Cultures is cooperating with partners in Spain and Bolivia to examine a special aspect of colo nial history the relationship between Latin America and Europe in terms of trade and the transfer of images, and economic structures and ways of thinking. The project’s directors An dreas Siekmann, Alice Creischer, Max Hinderer (Santa Cruz / Berlin) and Silvia Rivera Cusi canqui (La Paz) will investigate how economic and image-political conditions have influenced world order, and with it, our perception of the world since the 16th century. The exhibition will feature colonial-period Andean paintings and

contemporary works that refer to the visual transfer of colonial history to show how the viceroyalty of Peru, which spanned most of the South American continent, was systematically exploited. The title of the project refers to the city of Potosí, located in the Bolivian highlands, which was one of the legendary silver-mining cities of colonial times and synonymous for wealth for hundreds of years. Even today, Span ish speaking people commonly use the idiom »vale un Potosí«, meaning »it’s worth a fortune«. According to the curators, the Potosí Prin ciple not only applies to Hispanic America, but to other geographic regions and time peri ods. An international team of experts is current ly researching the relationship between capital istic world order and image production and how it affects the way we perceive the world. Their findings will be presented in this exhibition and at an international scientific conference. An ad ditional educational programme is also planned. The project’s partners and exhibition venues in clude the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Rei na Sofía in Madrid, the Museo Nacional de Bel las Artes and the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folclore, both in La Paz (Bolivia).

Artistic director: Andreas Siekmann /Artists: Alice Creischer, Max Hinderer ( AT ) , Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Sonia Abían ( AR ) , Lotte Arndt, Isabel Carrillo, Chto Delat, Anthony Davies GB ) , Mattijs de Bruijne ( NL ) , Zhao Liang CHN , David Riff ( RU , Dimitry Vilensky RU ) and others / House of World Cultures, Berlin, 26 Aug.— 14 Nov. 2010 ; conference 27 28 Aug. 2010 / Haus der Kulturen der Welt www.hkw.de

ulrike grossarth szeroka 28 exhibi tion and book project A remarkable pho to series by the Lublin photographer Stefan Kielsznia (1911 1987) depicts life in the Jewish quarter of Lublin shortly before it was occupied and destroyed by the Germans in World War II . Commissioned by the Lublin municipal administration in 1938, Kielsznia took approximately 600 pictures of buildings and street scenes in the Jewish quarter. Today it represents a unique document of Jewish daily life in Po land prior to the war. To our present knowledge, about a quarter of these photos only exist as negatives. The project intends to systematically ex amine and digitalize them. This collection of remarkable photos was discovered by the artist Ulrike Grossarth, a professor at the College of Fine Arts in Dresden, on one of her many trips through Eastern Europe. She has intensively studied Jewish history and channelled her find ings into her artistic works for years. Grossarth uses black-and-white photos of shops, signs and advertisements from the 1930s as a basis for paintings in which she abstracts photographic details or reconstructs them in colour. An exhi bition in Dresden and a presentation in Lublin will feature these historic photographs together with Grossarth’s new works of art. The photo series will be published and scientifically stud ied in an extensive trilingual publication (Ger man, English and Polish).

Artistic director: Silke Wagler / Curators: Marcin Federowicz ( PL , Christiane Mennicke / Artist: Ulrike Grossarth / Kunsthaus Dresden, Städtische Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, 11 June—22 Sept. 2010 ; book presentation Os´rodek »Brama Grodzka-Teatr« Lublin, Poland, Sept. 2010 / Staatli che Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kunstfonds www.skd-dresden.de

film and new media

welt am draht — new master copy film digitalization In 1973 Rainer Werner Fass binder made a film adaptation of Simula cron-3 a novel written in 1964 by Daniel F. Galouye, one of the first writers to ever describe the phenomenon of virtual reality. His two-part science-fiction film Welt am Draht [World on the Wire] represented a new artistic direction for Fassbinder, who was supported by Michael Ballhaus’s brilliant camera work. The film is an early example of their intensive and successful collaboration with all the essential elements that characterized their later joint projects. Al though the work still possesses social and political relevance, it is hardly ever shown because of the poor condition of the 16 -mm original. Therefore, this project plans to digitalize the negatives to produce a new high-quality master copy. Following its restoration, the digital ver sion will be adapted for cinema presentation and made available to international audiences on DVD and as a download. Following Berlin Alexanderplatz : Remastered , funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the director’s death, the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation will now begin its new restoration project in order to preserve the epoch-making film Welt am Draht for future generations. Artistic director: Michael Ballhaus / Artists: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (director, co-author, screenwriter) , Michael Ball haus (camera) , Daniel F. Galouye (author of novel) / Featur ing: Klaus Löwitsch, Mascha Rabben, Karl-Heinz Vosger au, Barbara Valentin, Gottfried John, Günter Lamprecht, Margit Carstensen Eddie Constantine F ) Ivan Desny F ) Adrian Hoven A , Rainer Langhans / Premiere Berlin (Berli nale), 11 21 Feb. 2010 ; US premiere New York ( MoMa), 1 8 May 2010 / Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation

the women of ravensbrück — the video archive preservation and utilization of interviews with prisoners of the ravensbrück concentration camp Between 1980 and 2008 Loretta Walz spoke with numerous female prisoners of the Ravensbrück concentration camp and recorded their inter views on videotape. She not only asked the sur vivors to recount their experiences at the camp, but also describe their lives prior to and follow ing the war. In this way Walz collected more than 200 interviews with former prisoners from 23 countries. With over 7,500 hours of interviews on approx. 1,500 video cassettes, her collection is one of the largest of its kind in Germany, for which she was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2006. These irreplaceable historic documents are now in danger of being lost, as analogue video tape only has a limited lifespan. This project will digitalize a large portion of the collection, save it to hard disk and create a database that can be used for purposes of political education, scientific study and by the general public. In order to optimally utilize the video interviews, they will be histori cally and scientifically categorized and integrat ed into a presentation interface that provides a comprehensive search function and easier ac cess to the material.

Artistic director: Loretta Walz / Writers: Karin Redlich, Knut Gerwers, Ulrich Rydzewski / Film presentation and activa tion of online database between 14 18 June 2010 / Waidak media e.V. www.waidak.de

digitalization of the lcb audio archive five decades of german literary history online Since 1963 the Literary Collo quium Berlin ( LCB ) has invited writers to read ings and discussions on the Wannsee with the goal of promoting inner European integration through intellectual exchange. Some of these writers of European renown include Günter Grass, Martin Walser, Herta Müller, Max Frisch, Felicitas Hoppe, Heiner Müller, Katja LangeMüller, Cees Nooteboom and Marlene Streeru witz. All the events lectures, readings, chaired discussions have been recorded on audiotape and broadcast in the radio programme Studio LCB . Since it began almost 50 years ago, the LCB Archive has accumulated approximate ly 730 audio recordings which reflect the role of intellectuals in an ever-changing society and document a cross-section of German literary history over the last half century. Because these tapes are susceptible to deterioration and break age, the LCB wishes to digitalize its unique col lection of post-war literature and then edit and present it on a digital platform. Enhanced with films and photos, and supplemented with infor mation about the writers, the spoken texts, pub lishers and presenters, the events will be present ed to the public as documents of contemporary history. In the long-term, the LCB wishes to in clude other recorded events from selected liter ary institutions and use the site as a national ar chive for literary conferences of all kinds.

Artistic directors: Thorsten Dönges and Marcel Regenberg / Literary Colloquium Berlin, 1 June 2009 30 June 2011 / Lit erarisches Colloquium Berlin www.lcb.de

music and sound

openop! european festival of smallscale music theatre »Music theatre in hu man proportion« is how the Neuköllner Oper describes its small-scale music theatre productions. It distinguishes itself from large-scale opera houses and festivals by presenting works based on the lives and stories of normal people. The Neuköllner Oper wishes to expand on this strategy with its newly established international network of small-scale music theatre producers, titled New Op . The project Open OP ! is de signed as a public festival, fair and laboratory, all in one. International guest performances, e.g., from Holland, Czech Republic, Belgium and Estonia, will present their current productions and, by exchanging ideas and information, will hopefully initiate joint collaboration on new projects of this type. The festival will also in clude a working conference and workshop, at which participants will prepare new produc tions based on the issue of migration.

www.neukoellneroper.de

behind the wall world premiere of a concert commemorating the 20th anniversary of german reunification The RIAS Kammerchor, founded as a radio cho rus in West Berlin in 1948, is devoted to promot ing contemporary music by commissioning new works or rehearsing and performing the world premieres of new music. In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the chorus will present a concert high lighting recent German history and particularly the theme of the Berlin Wall. Germany is not the only country that has struggled with a dividing wall. In Korea, a wall still separates the southern half of the peninsula from the north. Cyprus is divided by a wall, though crossing the border has become somewhat easier. Israel had hoped that erecting a wall would bring peace to the Israeli-Palestinian border area, and the United States is strengthening a wall to prevent more illegal immigration from Mexico. Around the world, walls symbolize violent conflicts and loss of freedom. The RIAS Kammerchor commissioned the Palestinian-Israeli composer Samir Odeh-Tamimi to write the composition. His works combine European and Arabic themes. The Dresden-born artist Christian Lehnert will write the libretto for the piece. His texts in clude Christian themes ( Passion , Cruci fixion ) and historic European literary motifs, combined with stories of places where walls stand or are being erected. The world premiere will take place in Berlin on 3 October 2009 with additional performances planned elsewhere, in cluding Ramallah and Jerusalem.

Artistic director: Hans-Christoph Rademann /Artists: Samir Odeh-Tamimi ( IL ) , Christian Lehnert, Rias Kammerchor, musikFabrik — Ensemble für Neue Musik / concert at the Philharmonie Berlin, 2 Oct. 2010 ; concert at the Frauen kirche Dresden, 16 Oct. 2010 ; concerts in Jerusalem, Ram allah and Istanbul, Oct. 2010 ; additional concerts in War saw, Amsterdam and Antwerp / Rundfunk-Orchester undChöre GmbH www.roc-berlin.de

tonlagen festival dresden festival of contemporary music During the last 22 years, the Dresden Days of Contempo rary Music has gained international renown as a high-quality festival of modern music. Hosted by the European Center for the Arts in Hel lerau every autumn, the festival has traditionally concentrated on serious music. In 2009 its new artistic director Dieter Jaenicke will steer the festival in a different direction. In order to appeal to larger audiences, this year’s festival will supplement contemporary music with related genres, such as dance, performance art, film, theatre and literature. The programme will also include electronic music experiments, sound collages, sound installations and avant-garde rock and pop music concerts by groups like The

Knife and Coco Rosie . The past focus on European music will expand to include contem porary pieces from India, China, Latin America and Africa. With this new direction, the festival not only hopes to attract new audiences in the long term, but also improve the conditions for entering large-scale cooperative ventures with other festivals of contemporary music in Eu rope.

Artists: Saâdane Afifi ( FR , Theo Bleckmann, Dresdner Sin foniker, Ellery Eskelin ( US , Ensemble Ascolta, Ensemble Courage, ensemble of the European Workshop for Con temporary Music, Fabrizio Cassol, Coco Rosie, Ex Novo Ensemble IT , Gary Versace ( US , Heiner Goebbels, John Hollenbeck ( US ) , Hotel Pro Forma DK , Klangforum Wien AT ) , musikFabrik The Knife SE Tony Malaby ( US ) Xavier Le Roy ( F ) / Festspielhaus Hellerau, Dresden, 1 18 Oct. 2009 / Europäisches Zentrum der Künste Hellerau www.hellerau.org

rithaa — dance of the afterlife music theatre performance featuring arabic dirges and mourning rituals Rithaa — Dance of the Afterlife , a music theatre piece based on Arabic dirges and mourning rituals from Egypt, was created in collaboration with the Swiss composer Mela Meierhans. It is the second part of the Afterlife Trilo gies based on death rituals of the three major monotheistic religions. In this joint production between the Berliner Festspiele / MaerzMusik and the Gare du Nord, Bahnhof für Neue Musik Basel, two radically different musical cultures clash Arabic folk music and contemporary European music. Rithaa Dance of the Afterlife is divided into five musical scenes death, shrouding, vigil, burial and memorial. The significant elements of the composition in clude the Arabic music so strongly influenced by language and poetry, the recitatives of a fe male narrator who describes Arabic death ritu als and the traditional dirges sung by a nadabah By contrasting and comparing traditions and the reality of today, the piece examines the topi cality of traditions and rituals for dealing with death.

Artistic director: Ursula Freiburghaus ( CH / Composition: Me la Meierhans / Vocals / Oud: Kamilya Jubran / World pre miere: MaerzMusik Festival Berlin, 19 28 Mar. 2010 ; Bah nhof für Neue Musik, Gare du Nord, Basel, 14 23 Oct. 2010 ; Markan, Egyptian Center for Culture and Art, Cairo, 1 7 Nov. 2010 / Gare du Nord, Bahnhof für Neue Musik, Basel

the blue sound 40 years of ecm records concerts, symposium, cere mony and documentation as part of the enjoy jazz festival With a special com memorative festival, symposium and documen tation, the Enjoy Jazz Festival honours the historic achievements of the Edition for Contemporary Music ( ECM ). The ECM recording label was founded 40 years ago by the Munich producer Manfred Eicher. In the begin ning ECM mainly concentrated on producing jazz releases. Later, the ECM New Series began promoting a wide variety of modern musical styles. Today, ECM is one of the world’s leading recording labels for contemporary music and is responsible for outstanding achievements in this area. Without the efforts of ECM, the re cordings of numerous compositions from past

decades would have been irretrievably lost or never released. ECM strengthened jazz and socalled serious music to an equal degree, established ties to both areas, and in so doing, encouraged European-American musical dia logue. A distinctive feature of all the releases is the care and perfection ECM puts into its record ings, cover designs and accompanying texts. For this reason many well-known musicians and composers, such as Keith Jarrett, Jan Garbarek, Arvo Pärt and György Kurtág, have chosen to publish large parts of their oeuvre through ECM

Artistic directors: Rainer Kern, Hans-Jürgen Linke, Wolf gang Sandner / Artists: Terje Rypdahl N ) and others / Castle of Mannheim, 22 25 Oct. 2009 / Enjoy Jazz www.enjoyjazz.de

beat furrer desert book a music theatre performance In cooperation with Theater Basel, the composer Beat Furrer and au thor Händel Klaus have developed a music thea tre project which takes a close look at images of death from ancient Egypt. The theatre text was based on ancient Egyptian texts about death, translated for the first time by the Egyptologist and Orientalist Jan Assmann. The texts are fas cinating in that they also depict the ritual of death as a vibrant celebration of life. In Egyp tian mythology, the desert is a metaphor for the unknown and for death. Even in the European tradition (e.g., the barren icescapes by Caspar David Friedrich or the depopulated cities with their abandoned industrial complexes), the desert is where we project our fear of forgetting, of emptiness and the unknown. In addition to the primary text by Händl Klaus, texts by Angel Valente, Nazim Hikmet and Ingeborg Bach mann will be woven into the libretto. Beat Fur rer will compose a score for a small orchestra with singers and speakers. Christoph Marthaler is expected to direct the piece. Composition: Beat Furrer CH ) / Author: Händl Klaus CH ) / Director: Christoph Marthaler CH ) / Musicians: Klangforum Wien AT ) , Vokalensemble / Actors: Isabelle Menke and Syl vie Rohrer ( AT / Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Berlin, 19 21 Mar. 2010 / Berliner Festspiele www.maerzmusik.de

multimedia amazonian opera music theatre, technology, science The Ama zon rainforest is the world’s largest forested area and fresh-water reservoir. Most people are gen erally aware that clear-cutting, live-stock breed ing, monoculture, and the exploitation of ener gy resources and raw materials pose a dramatic threat to its unique species and the livelihood of its indigenous peoples. Yet hardly any immedi ate or long-term measures have been taken to effectively counter this development. If current trends continue, scientists predict that the Ama zon rainforest will be almost completely deci mated by 2080, with far-reaching consequences for our global climate. The goal of this multime dia opera project is to express the anxiety caused by the irretrievable loss of the rainforest the »Amazonian pain« (Peter Sloterdijk). Compos ers, media artists, shamans of the Yanomami one of the last major indigenous peoples of South America, anthropologists and sociolo gists will jointly develop a concept that includes both the latest scientific findings and native cos mology and spirituality. The artistic examina

tion of this issue aims to sharpen our awareness of the dangerous developments in the Amazon. A comprehensive educational programme for children and young adults will accompany the project, along with symposiums, exhibitions and publications.

Artistic director: Peter Ruzicka / Director: Michael Scheidl ( AT / Author: Laymert Garcia dos Santos ( BR ) / Composers: Tato Taborda ( BR , Klaus Schedl / Writers: Michael Scheidl AT and Bruce Albert ( FR / Fine artists: Nora Scheidl ( AT ) , Leandro Lima BR ) , Gisela Motta BR ) / Reithalle Munich, 9 13 May 2010 ; Teatro San Carlos, Lisbon (Portugal), 20 23 May 2010 ; SESC SP, São Paulo, Brazil, 19 22 Aug. 2010 ; Schouw burg, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 18 22 May 2010 / Kul turreferat Landeshauptstadt München www.muenchen.de/kulturreferat

musica mobile the musicalized coun try The music and sound art festival Was hören wir ? Das musikalisierte Land [What do we hear? The Musicalized Country] is a musical highlight that takes place every year in the rural region between Leipzig, Dresden and Chemnitz. For the next three years, the fes tival will experiment with new performance venues and forms based on different types of movement. The theme in 2009 is the musical ized city during which visitors explore the city of Grimma on a musical walking tour. In 2010, visitors will participate in a musical cycling tour on the musicalized cycle route, and in 2011, festival goers will travel down the musicalized river by boat. This mobile form poses a challenge to audiences and artists alike. The featured works have to be concretely tailored to the landscapes. The musicians must be able to acoustically deliver the pieces to a moving audience. Therefore, the dramaturgical sequence of the planned concerts, performanc es and (sound) installations will be extremely challenging. The project will be directed by the renowned sound artist Erwin Stache.

Artistic director: Erwin Stache / Sound artists: Atonor, Ros witha von den Driesch Jens-Uwe Dyffort Frauke Eckardt Christina Kubisch, Giuliamo Modarelli IT , Mia Zabelka AT ) , Iñigo Zibikoa ES / Composers: Peter Ablinger ( AT , Wolfgang Heisig, Berlind Preinfalk AT ) , Oliver Schneller / Musical walking tour in Grimma, 12 Sept. 2009 ; Musical cycling tour along Muldental bicycle route, 11 Sept. 2010 ; Musical boating expedition on the Mulde near Grimma, 11 Sept. 2011 / Denkmalschmiede Höfgen www.hoefgen.de

theatre and movement

choreographing you art and dance of the last 50 years Choreographing You is the first exhibition that examines the in terplay between art and dance in terms of choreography of inventing and shaping motion.

Artistic director: Andreas Altenhof, Bernhard Glocksin, Christian Römer / Artists: Moritz Eggert, Franznobel ( A ) , Volker Schmidt ( A ) , Hans Platzgumer ( A ) , Sommer Ulrickson US , Peeter Jalakas EE ) , Jiri Adamek CZ , Susanne Marx NL ) , Evrim Demirel ( TUR ) , Joachim Brackx B ) , Oscar van den Boogard ( B , Filip Rathé ( B ) , Steven van Watermeulen B , Vicent van den Elshout ( B ) Daniel Capelletti ( IT Francis Pollet F ) Michaela Bartonovoa & Martin Kadelec ( CZ and others / Neuköllner Oper, Berlin, 8 18 Apr. 2010

The aesthetic quality and intention of these joint installations by artists and choreographers can only be experienced when the visitor moves in certain ways. The choreographic concept is to make the visitors’ motions an intrinsic com ponent of the works, without which their inten tion could not be realized. The exhibition will demonstrate that choreography is not simply a matter of writing down or documenting mo tions, but can take place as part of sculptural works and installations for example, when the visitor stretches his body, lifts weights or balances in such a way that the installation can achieve its full potential. These types of en counters with objects in space alter the percep tion of ourselves as living components of a work and confuse our expectations, as we are accus tomed to keeping at a respectful distance when viewing pieces of art. The exhibition will display a wide range of works, for example, Bruce Nau man’s corridor pieces from the 1960s which experiment with the reduction of mobility, and recent works like Scattered Crowd (2002 ) by William Forsythe that features a room with thousands of white balloons which react to the visitor’s movement and constantly change the sculptural environment. Historic and recon structed works will be displayed alongside newer pieces specially made for the exhibition. An extensive performance programme will accom pany the event outside the exhibition rooms.

Artistic directors: Stephanie Rosenthal, Nicky Molloy, An dré Lepecki FR ) / Artists: Jerôme Bel FR ) , Pablo Bronstein ( UK ) , Trisha Brown ( US ) , Alain Buffard, Rosemary Butcher ( UK ) , Boris Charmatz FR ) Gustovo Ciriacs Marie Cool FR and Fabio Balducci ( I ) , Vinent Dupont, William Forsythe US , Si mone Forti US ) , Allan Kaprow ( US , Latifa Laâbissi FR ) , Tho mas Lehmen, Marcela Levi BR ) , Kate Mcintosh ( NZ , Ohad Meromi IL ) , Mathilde Monnier FR , Robert Morris ( US ) , Jen nifer Nelson US ) , Miguel Pereira ( AR ) , Robin Rhode ( ZA , Xavi er le Roy ( FR , Peter Welz, Franz West AT ) / Kunsthalle Ham burg starting May 2010 followed by presentation at The Hayward, Southbank Centre, London ( GB ) / The Hayward www.haywardgallery.org.uk

the planning and development of the festival house africa a social sculp ture by christoph schlingensief With his plan to build a festival house in Africa, Christoph Schlingensief envisions a cultural venue on the African continent that neither imitates European models nor is regarded as a foreign aid measure. On the contrary, as Schlingensief ex plains, the venue should be a place of exchange between »the declining civilization of Europe« and »emerging black culture«. In his opinion, opera long recognized as a symbol of Euro pean high culture is in a state of paralysis and social alienation. The Festival House Africa will contribute to »resocializing« opera and anchor ing it more firmly in everyday life. By gaining access to Africa’s culture and becoming aware of the potential of opera through unfettered imagination and creativity, and the reflection on social circumstances the artist hopes that both continents can benefit from reciprocal ef fects. The Africans will be able to use opera as a creative motor and Europeans will be able to regard it again as a social organism. This mutual transfer will transform »the needy into helpers (…), the missionaries into the converted« (C. Schlingensief). The festival house is conceived

as a meeting place for African and German art ists who wish to collaborate on joint produc tions. It will be open to all segments of the pop ulation and serve as a centre of exchange for scholars. Burkina Faso, Tanzania and Mozam bique are being discussed as possible locations for the house. The design of the building will include elements of central European theatre and opera models combined with local, tradi tional architecture and object art. The develop ment phase is part of the artistic project which will be presented in the form of an installation during the Herrenhausen Festival Weeks

Artistic director: Christoph Schlingensief / Artistic advisor: Diédédo Francis Kéré ( BF ) / Herrenhausen Festival Weeks, 1 30 June 2010. Part of the project involves finding a suita ble location in Africa. www.festspielhaus-afrika.com

oedipus rex international dance project The Argentinean Constanza Macras will venture into new artistic territory with her upcoming production of the operatic oratory Oedipe Roi by Igor Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau. In her version of this modern classic an opera with a symphony orchestra and chorus Macras intends to apply tools of mod ern dance theatre while retaining the original principles of the piece, i.e., rejection of stage realism and psychological interpretation. In Macras’s version, the narrative of the opera is told by eight dancers. She has also re-organized the original two-act opera into five scenes. Each scene resembles a living portrait, and together, she creates a choreographed series of tableaux vivants, inspired by Gregory Crewd son’s photographic hyperrealism and Jeff Wall’s staged photography. Macras has chosen to keep the Latin song text in Cocteau/Stravinsky’s ver sion as it emphasizes the timeless nature of the material. Oedipus Rex is a co-production by the European Center for the Arts in Hellerau, the Teatro Comunale di Ferrara and the MESS Sarajevo festival.

Artistic director: Constanza Macras AR / Musical director: Max Renne / Dramaturge: Carmen Mehnert / Dance: Chi harua Shiota JP ) / European Center for the Arts Hellerau, 19 21 Nov. 2009 / Constanza Macras / Dorky Park, Berlin

beating time, so fast bodies_china Jutta Hell and Dieter Baumann, dancer and choreographer of the Berlin dance company RUBATO, are interested in how the human body is affected by the compulsion to function in a society based on permanent productivity. Re searching for their dance project, the artists found ideal conditions in the Chinese cities of Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou emblem atic centres of turbo capitalism. They met with textile workers in clothing manufac turing companies, migrant workers at construc tion sites, consumers at shopping centres, and travellers at train stations in order to get an idea of how work, overexertion and exhaustion af fects the body both physically and psychologi cally. The documentary material observa tions, conversations, interviews, photos, audio and video recordings were used as the drama turgical and choreographic basis for human functioning. The result is a disturbing, but touching piece that points beyond the specific circumstances in China. The performances in

Beijing, Berlin and Swansea (Great Britain) will be supplemented by exhibitions that provide insight into the extensive research work and re hearsals with the Chinese dancers. Director, choreographer: Jutta Hell and Dieter Baumann / Dramaturge: Björn Dirk Schlüter / Composition: Yang Ze Hua CHN / Dance, choreography: Tao Ye Cheng Kai Ling Xi Li, Wang Hao, Er Gao, Duan Ni ( all CHN ) / Tao Studio, Bei jing, 7 9 May 2010 ; Yunna Studio, Guangzhou, 16 18 July 2010 ; Radialsystem e.V., Berlin, 26 29 Aug. 2010 ; Taliesin Arts Centre Swansea, Wales ( GB , 2 4 Sept. 2010

colombia festival theatre festival and lectures In recent years, the world has come to associate negative news with Colombia civil war, corruption, drug cartels, latifundium systems, gun battles between paramilitary and guerrilla groups and atrocities against civilians. In 2010 the next presidential election will coin cide with the 200th anniversary of the country’s declaration of independence. Not only will nu merous public celebrations draw media atten tion, but also public demonstrations as Colom bians take to the streets in protest. To mark this occasion, the Theater Hebbel am Ufer has asked Colombian artists whether they see any reason to celebrate. What do normal Colombians think of their own history which has so strongly shaped the collective consciousness of its society? Which themes are important to artists in this commemorative year and in their daily lives? Two dance companies and three theatre groups will increase public awareness of these social issues by presenting performances that reflect the perspective of artists who critically view the socio-political reality of their country and articulate the hopes and fears of its inhabit ants. The festival will also feature fine art from Colombia, current films about the political and social situation there, lectures and podium dis cussions. It will celebrate a country that, despite political circumstances and a lack of support systems, has a richly diverse cultural scene. Artistic directors: Gustavo Liano ( CO Kirsten Hehmeyer / Artists: Manuel Orjuela Cortés ( CO , Rolf & Heidi Abderhalden CO ) , Tino Fernandez CO ) and others / Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, 19 Apr.— 2 May 2010 www.hebbel-am-ufer.de

choreographic captures 2009 — 2011 In 2008 an international competition called on choreographers, film and media artists to sub mit Choreographic Captures a new short film format that explores various forms of represen tation and realization of choreography and art film. In the meantime, five of the submitted clips have been selected and are currently being shown at cinemas throughout Germany. The project Choreographic Captures 2009 2011 will continue developing this successful prototype for three more years. In addition to holding an annual professional competition, the project’s website will be expanded into a multilingual, interactive platform for choreo graphic short films from around the world. By including interactive options, the project organ izers hope to open up new virtual spaces for this art form, as well as encourage more people who are interested in making their own highquality artistic clips. The artistic director Walter Heun wishes to work with international artists to anchor Choreographic Captures in media-based (youth) culture and promote its international

distribution. In addition to making the films widely available via its Internet portal, the project will look into using other digital channels to promote the interaction between choreography and media art.

Artistic director: Walter Heun / Jury members: Andreas Ströhl, Thierry de Mey ( B Frédéric Mazelly F ) / Film screenings throughout Europe and interactive online presentation, 16 June 2009 —Nov. 2011 / Joint Adventures www.jointadventures.net

among cannibals post-colonial perspectives — brazilian and german contemporary theatre After almost 500 years of colonial history, what distinguishes the rela tionship between Europeans and Latin Ameri cans? Have we finally closed the chapter on ex ploitation and forced dependence, or does the wealthy continent in the northern hemisphere still take advantage of the poor continent in the south? On the basis of these central questions, this four-part theatre project titled Among Cannibals examines what prejudices, com plexes and taboos continue to exist in the postcolonial societies on both continents. The thea tre project is directed by the German drama turge Matthias Pees in cooperation with the Brazilian Ricardo Muniz Fernandes and in volves the participation of German and Brazil ian theatre artists.

Artistic director: Matthias Pees / Dramaturgical assistant: Ricardo Muniz Fernandes ( BR / Director: Dimiter Gotscheff, Tilmann Köhler, Florian Loycke, Nicola Nord/Alexander Karschnia / Writers: Tina Rahel Völker, Alexandre del Farra ( BR ) and others / Participating artists: Das Helmi and company & co., Centro de Pesquisa Teatral / Antunes Filho ( BR , Grupo Tablado de Arruar BR ) and others / Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Kampnagel Hamburg, Forum Freies Theater Düsseldorf, Ringlokschuppen Mühlheim/Ruhr, Ballhaus Ost Berlin, Servigo Social do Comércio de São Paulo ( BR , Festival Internacional de Artes Cênicas in Salva dor de Bahia, 1 July 2009 31 Dec. 2010 / Interior Produções Artisticas Internacionais www.prod.art.br

le bal. allemagne a german-german history This dance theatre project adapts an idea first dramatized in the now legendary thea tre piece Le Bal by the Théâtre du Campagnol in the 1980s. The dance performance highlights the history of French society and was made into a successful film of the same name by Ettore Scola in 1983. Arranged in chronological order, the episodic scenes feature people in a ballroom, each of whom represent a different generation as expressed by their personal stories, their clothing and the music, to which they dance. The original French version has been interna tionally adapted many times, and, interestingly enough, twice already in Germany. The West German production by Jochen Schölch and the East German piece by Steffen Mensching retell the respective histories of their German states. This new adaptation by Nurkan Erpulat and Tunçay Kulaog˘lu will add dialogues to the original non-verbal dance theatre version and present the complete German history on stage, starting from the early post-war years of Ger man division to the Peaceful Revolution of 1989. The piece will particularly explore the problematic issue of German identity as it portrays the background of immigration in both German states. An international artist ex

change with three partner venues in London, Tel Aviv and Istanbul aims to create impulses that go beyond Germany.

Artistic director: Shermin Langhoff / Director: Nurkan Erpulat ( TR / Composer: Enis Rotthoff / Author / dramaturge: Tunçay Kulaog˘lu ( TR ) / Set designer: Alexander Wolf / Ball haus Naunynstraße Berlin, 1 30 Apr. 2010 / Kultursprünge e.V. im Ballhaus Naunynstraße www.ballhausnaunynstrasse.de

elucidations science-fiction music theatre performance The Hungarian cho reographer and performance artist Eszter Sala mon has teamed up with the fine artist Domin ique Gonzales-Foerster and a composer of elec tronic music to develop a new science-fiction musical. The story, music and choreography are based on the choréia, an ancient Greek theatrical form characterized by the absolute equivalence of poetry, dance and music. The piece starts out by asking how we can think about the future based on present conditions. The story revolves around seven fictitious landscapes featur ing sounds, thoughts and characters which por tray a post-biological era. Elucidations does not present these futuristic visions as neatly packaged plots, but rather allows the audience to experience them associatively through sound, light, voices, movement and smells. The inter action of imagination and sensory perception creates a theatrical and poetic space for reflec tion, in which the viewer can experience him self as a constitutive part of the performance. Artistic director: Eszter Salamon / Dramaturgy: Bojana Cvejic RS ) Gérald Kurdian ( FR Eszter Salamon ( H ) / Featuring: Sas¸a Asentic´( BA , Bojana Cvejic´( RS/NL ) , Gérald Kurdian FR ) , Eszter Salamon ( H ) and others / Musical assistant: Gerald Kurdian ( FR / Musical advisor: Berno Odo Polzer ( A ) / Set de signer: Dominique Gonzales-Foerster ( FR ) / Kaaitheater Brussels, Kunstfestivaldesarts, May 2010 ; Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Tanz im August, Aug. 2010 ; additional perform ances: Kampnagel Hamburg and PACT Zollverein Cho reographisches Zentrum NRW, Essen / Botschaft GbR

musictheatresamples contemporary music theatre in samples MusicThe atreSamples is a series of four music theatre productions which examine the contemporary strategy of artistic recycling. The piece Life and Times by the Nature Theater of Okla homa ( NYC ) is based on a recorded telephone conversation lasting several hours in which an anonymous woman tells her life story in chron ological order. The composer Robert M. Johan son has adapted this material into an opera with a small cast which musically interprets the wom an’s vocal tone, rhythm, speed and linguistic style. For his piece Global Design , Chris tian von Borries has created a new libretto of Western art music based on texts by three economics specialists. Musicians can apply via YouTube to participate in the performance which will be presented later on YouTube, as well. The music theatre piece El Gallo by the Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes in Mexico City is based on the rehearsals of a fictitious chorus competition. The improvisations by the actors and musicians from the rehearsals will be com piled and presented in the final piece. In Hip Hop Hype History, Barbara Weber exam ines the origin of sampling which began in the hip hop scene of the 1970s. The performance

will feature German hip hop musicians re-en acting famous battles in the roles of their heroes, enemies and ideals. All four projects highlight a new quality of contemporary art production embracing existing material, reinterpreting it, integrating one’s own ideas and increasingly blurring the boundary between creation and copy, or consumption and production.

Artistic director: Amelie Deuflhard / With works by: Pavol Liska US , Kelly Copper ( US , Claudio Valdés Kuri ( MEX , Chris tian von Borries, Barbara Weber CH / Kampnagel Ham burg, 1 May— 1 Oct. 2009 / Kampnagel Internationale Kul turfabrik www.kampnagel.de

from Sarajevo where Muslim, Catholic, Ortho dox and Jewish life and culture overlap. In his works, he intensively investigates the causes of misunderstanding between East and West. Us ing Karahasan’s works as a starting point, the International Writers’ Days in Ost westfalen will look for ways Western and East ern cultures and religions can enter into dialogue, characterized by a new form of cosmopolitan ism which respects the plurality of different cul tures. The goal of this project is to initiate joint cultural exchange with readings, lectures and discussions which examine the differences and similarities in various bodies of literature and religions. The project will explore the theme of borders as a cultural phenomenon and a place of encounter in radio plays and theatre perform ances. The programme will be supplemented by an exhibition titled Bosnia and Herze govina 1888 2008 and a concert of ancient Muslim, Jewish and Christian vocal music. The project will conclude with readings that take visitors on a literary excursion to places of his toric, intercultural encounters in Sarajevo.

Artistic director: Brigitte Labs-Ehlert / Writers: Dzˇevad Karahasan BA ) Ilma Rakusa ( CH Constantin von Barloewen and others / Various locations in Ostwestfalen, 1 Oct.— 31 Dec. 2009 www.literaturbuero-detmold.de

word and knowledge

stories of a society at day zero icelandic sagas in free narration Icelandic sagas are among the few original texts of early medie val literature and are unique artworks of Icelan dic culture. In contrast to the traditional sagas of Nordic mythology, Icelandic stories possess no fantastic elements. They describe the begin nings and development of early Icelandic society between 930 and 1030 AD when the first set tlers came to the island. They describe the con flicts which ensued as they divided the land among themselves and the endless struggle against the powerful forces of nature. All the stories reflect the social historic reality at day zero in Icelandic society. References to the sa gas can be found everywhere in Iceland today, but beyond its shores, they are practically un known. In order to introduce these sagas to Ger man audiences and demonstrate the potential of free narration for European literary tradition and education, Klaus Sander has invited Ice landers to historic venues to tell their sagas once again. The stories will then be translated, com piled and published as an audio book a vi brant expression of orally communicated litera ture. The former director of the Icelandic Saga Museum, Arthur Björgvin Bollason, will ac company his listeners on this voyage as the nar rator and translator.

Artistic director and production director: Klaus Sander / Narrator and translator: Arthur Björgvin Bollason ISL ) / Produc tion and recording director: Thomas Böhm / Literaturhaus Stuttgart, Literaturhaus Berlin, Literaturhaus Cologne, Literaturhaus Rostock, Bremen public library in spring 2011 ; audio book production, nationwide 1 May 2009 1 March 2011 / supposé www.suppose.de

of gardens and sad elephants — the poetry of the border international writers’ conference on dzˇevad karahasan Dzˇevad Karahasan, the Bosnian writer and winner of the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding in 2004, comes

committees

board of trustees The Board of Trustees is re sponsible for making final decisions concerning the gener al focus of the Foundation’s activities, its funding priorities and organizational structure. The 14-member board reflects the political levels which were integral to the Foundation’s establishment. Trustees are appointed for a five-year term.

Bernd Neumann

Chairman of the Board

Representing the Federal Foreign Office Representing the Federal Ministry of Finance Representing the German Bundestag

Representing the German Länder

Representing the German municipalities

Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Cultural Foundation of German States Representing the fields of art and culture

Minister of State in the Federal Chancellery and Commissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs Dr. Peter Ammon State Secretary Werner Gatzer Parliamentary State Secretary Prof. Dr. Norbert Lammert President of the German Bundestag Wolfgang Thierse Vice President of the German Bundestag Hans-Joachim Otto Chairman of the Parliamentary Cultural Committee Dr. Valentin Gramlich State Secretary, Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs of Saxony-Anhalt Prof. Dr. Joachim Hofmann-Göttig State Secretary, Ministry of Science, Continuing Education, Research and Culture of Rhineland-Palatinate Klaus Hebborn Councillor for Education, Culture and Sports, Association of German Cities Uwe Lübking Councillor, Association of German Towns and Municipalities Stanislaw Tillich Minister-President of Saxony

Senta Berger

Actress, President of the German Film Academy, Berlin Durs Grünbein Author Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolf Lepenies Sociologist

advisory committee The Advisory Committee makes recommendations concerning the thematic focus of the Foundation’s activities. The committee is comprised of leading figures in the arts, culture, business, academics and politics.

Dr. Christian Bode Secretary General of the DAAD Prof. Dr. Clemens Börsig Chairman of the Cultural Committee of German Business with the BDI e.V. Jens Cording President of the Society for Contemporary Music Dr . Michael Eissenhauer President of the Association of German Museums Prof. Dr. Max Fuchs Chairman of the German Arts Council Martin Maria Krüger President of the German Music Council Prof. Dr. h.c. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann President of the Goethe-Institut Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen Secretary General of the Cultural Foundation of German States Prof. Dr. Oliver Scheytt President of the Cultural Policy Society and Dept. Head for Cultural Affairs of Essen Johano Strasser President of the German P E N. Center Frank Werneke

Deputy Chairman of the ver.di labour union Prof. Klaus Zehelein President of the German Theatre Association

juries and curatorial panels

The Federal Cultural Foundation draws on the scientific and artistic expertise of about 50 jury and curatorial panel members who consult the Foundation on thematic and project-specific matters. For more information about these committees, please visit the corresponding projects described on our website www.kulturstiftung-bund.de.

Hortensia Völckers

Artistic Director Alexander Farenholtz

executive board team

Assistant to the Executive Board

Administrative Director

Kirsten Haß [standing in for Lavinia Francke] Legal Advisor Dr. Ferdinand von Saint André Press and Public Relations Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel [dept. head] / Tinatin Eppmann / Diana Keppler / Julia Mai / Christoph Sauerbrey / Arite Studier

General Project Funding

Torsten Maß [dept. head] / Bärbel Hejkal / Steffi Khazhueva

Programme Department Dorit von Derschau / Eva Maria Gauß / Anita Kerzmann / Antonia Lahmé / Anne Maase / Annett Meineke / Dr. Lutz Nitsche / Uta Schnell

Administration

Contributions and Controlling

Secretary’s Office

Steffen Schille [dept. head] / Margit Ducke / Maik Jacob / Steffen Rothe / Kristin Salomon / Kristin Schulz

Anja Petzold [dept. head] / Ines Deák / Anne Dittrich / Susanne Dressler / Marcel Gärtner / Andreas Heimann / Doris Heise / Berit Koch / Fabian Märtin / Marko Stielicke

Beatrix Kluge / Beate Ollesch [Berlin office] / Christine Werner

Published by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes / Franckeplatz 1 / 06110 Halle an der Saale / Tel 0345 2997 0 / Fax 0345 2997 333 / info@kulturstiftung-bund.de / www.kulturstiftung-bund.de

Executive Board Hortensia Völckers / Alexander Farenholtz [responsible for the content]

Editor Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel Editorial staff

Tinatin Eppmann / Christoph Sauerbrey

Distribution Arite Studier / Christoph Sauerbrey Translation by Robert Brambeer,

Print run 24,000 [German] / 4,000 [English] except pp. 35 37 by Antonia Llyod-Jones

Production hausstætter herstellung Design + Image Editing cyan Berlin Copy date 10 August 2009

By-lined contributions do not necessarily reflect the opin ion of the editor. © Kulturstiftung des Bundes All rights reserved. Reproduction in part or whole without prior written consent from the German Federal Cultural Foun dation is strictly prohibited.