ALLES KATASTROPHE! Stages Martin Zehetgruber
Edited by Judith Gerstenberg Theater der Zeit
Judith Gerstenberg and Stefanie Wagner during preparatory discussions for this book Vienna 30/06/2022
Stories, at best.
Contents 012 042 078 098 108 116
Visual memories
Judith Gerstenberg
My friend Martin
A conversation with Martin Kušej on shared beginnings in Graz
Shine or die
Andreas Schlager
The impossible and the unfathomable
Heide Kastler
Compromise? Never.
A conversation with Klaus von Schwerin
On the road to Utopia with Peer Gynt
On the Kresnik / Zehetgruber team Christoph Klimke
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Artistic encounter
168
I always felt like his spaces had their own life stories
200
The spaces became images, the images began to flow, the flow became music
234
Homeless bodies, homeless sound
246
On the collaboration with lighting designer Alexander Koppelmann Judith Gerstenberg Nicholas Ofczarek Georg Nigl
Barbara Frey
The Ludwigsburg Stage Tower
A conversation with Elisabeth Schweeger
254
Résumé, Works, Awards
268
Profiles
272
Acknowledgements, Image credits, Credits
Visual memories Judith Gerstenberg
Alles Katastrophe! BLACKOUT “Excuse me? – What kind of a title is that?” I am confused, and I give full voice to my displeasure. It is our first meeting for this book which is to present his set designs. Martin Zehetgruber looks at me, laughs, shrugs his shoulders: “Alles Walzer?” I wait in vain for a more detailed explanation. I consult my Austrian-German dictionary and I’m soon enmeshed in the cultural history of his homeland. “Alles Walzer!” – “Everybody waltz!” The annual command issued at the Vienna Opera Ball each year, the stiffness of studiously rehearsed bows from “the twirling tumult of the waltzing crowd”, is a cultural event viewed with suspicion beyond Austria’s borders – and it comes with a history. I read on about the profound intellectual upheavals that distinguish the origin story of this society dance, about revolutions, political uncertainties and about how the waltz “represents both an early manifestation of individualism and a collective escape to the ecstasy of dance” which the couples attain through incessant circular motion. I replace “Walzer” with “Katastrophe”, leaf through Zehetgruber’s image archive, and I understand. BLACKOUT Stories, at best. The subtitle. Martin Zehetgruber only supplies fragments. Flashes. Images that leave an after-impression on the retina. Connecting the pieces, the narrative, is something he leaves up to others. To me. To the audience. BLACKOUT Memories. No depictions. No templates. No real spaces. Remnants of impressions deposited in the memory – in his, in society’s. Situations, images, texts, encounters seized emotively. They pile up, forming a slag heap in his mind. This is where the designs for his sets originate. Spontaneously. He sketches them in writing. Only later does he research, seek substantiation for his intuition, consult materials from art and literature. BLACKOUT
BLACKOUT Voestalpine Stahl Donawitz. Europe’s largest contiguous steelworks at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The smelting works dominated the region. It was destroyed in the Second World War. Following post-war reconstruction, his father
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Childhood landscape, Donawitz. Styria. To be more precise: Upper Styria. That’s where he grew up. His first years. The snow: red. In the child’s memory. The local steel works had no filter system at the time. Sulphur dioxide. Fine dust. Graphite rain. Filth everywhere. Maybe it was algae that dyed the snow. A phenomenon at higher altitudes, including the Alps; they call it “blood snow”. An omen of misfortune – at least that’s what those who don’t subscribe to the scientific explanation believe.
managed the engineering office. It is renowned for its innovations in heavy industry, but is nonetheless doomed to extinction. BLACKOUT The discharge. The opening of the blast furnace vent. Illumination of the area that recurs regularly, bright as day in darkness. Slag. The liquid iron ore. Glowing bright red. Rain. The steam. The heat. The force. Overwhelming. Water for cooling. This is the most dangerous work in the smelting works. A surreal image. Apocalyptic. BLACKOUT His brother falls ill. Lungs. The family moves to nearby Trofaiach. A town for the better-off, which markets itself as “Styria’s liveable town”. The promise of clean air. A little street train. A big house for the family. A primary school. Apart from that – nothing. BLACKOUT Dead-end valley. “When you drive in, you have to drive out the same way.” This is where Zehetgruber lives until he is fourteen. He has never travelled anywhere else. The Erzberg looms at the end of the valley. Imposing nature, subject to violence at the hands of humanity for centuries. Visible. Exploding. Bursting open. Penetrating. Extracting. Exploiting. The wounds mark the landscape. BLACKOUT Drilling. Dynamite. Sledge hammer and iron. Holes. Fissures. Tunnels. An underground realm. Extraction below the earth. For centuries. Later: largescale open-cut mining. Stepped. Like terraces. Each has its own name. A mountain becomes a pyramid. Nature becomes culture. On the surface. Hubris, violence, work, misery are concealed below. BLACKOUT The myth of the water man. “According to the myth, the discovery of iron deposits on the Erzberg is attributed to the wisdom of a water man. He lived in a grotto to the north-west of Eisenerz and was caught by the residents near the Leopoldsteiner lake with the help of a cloak soaked in pitch. To buy his freedom, he offered ‘gold for a year’, ‘silver for a hundred years’ or ‘iron for evermore’. The wily Eisenerzers chose the latter, and the water man showed them the Erzberg. Once they had seen the iron deposits for themselves, they released the water man, who disappeared into a karst spring.” (roBerge.de, 15/06/2020) BLACKOUT Structual change. Not even Donawitz was spared. “Evermore” is no more. Even infinity has its limits. Steel, rust. Decline. The demise of an entire region. Dispersing, remaining. It becomes a life-long motif that is inscribed in Zehetgruber’s work.
BLACKOUT Early death of his father. To the family he leaves nothing but debt. The lustre of their bourgeois lifestyle has been dissolved in alcohol and other forms of self-destructive excess. They have truly come down in the world. His mother on her own with the children. The need for them to make their own way from then on, even the younger son. BLACKOUT The earth-shattering experience of decline. Can we invoke this as an experience and claim that it was from here that his fantasies emerged? I ask myself, I ask him. It’s difficult to say, answers Zehetgruber. But the fact that his images are fed by personal experience, by perceptions that form a subjective filter for observations and readings – that much is clear. The landscapes that he mounts on stage are familiar, so too the malign sprites that inhabit them. He puts himself into all his sets. And with each of his spaces he demands dialogue, forces an encounter with them. BLACKOUT Graz. City. Pulsing with life. A self-confident art scene committed to upheaval and experimentation. Every year the interdisciplinary festival steirischer herbst attracts global attention and international guests to the city. BLACKOUT
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Kunstgewerbeschule. Teachers recognise Zehetgruber’s talent and convince the family to send the fourteen-year-old to the Kunstgewerbeschule (arts and crafts school) in the state capital. He takes photographs. His father dies on the day that his first photo exhibition opens. Abstract works. Cracks in the asphalt. “Completely fine for the time.” Zehetgruber has destroyed all the images. To keep receiving the half-orphan pension, he drops photography and decides to study. Painting, to begin with. The teaching is old-fashioned. He switches to set design. He hears that it isn’t as taxing. That’s a good thing, because he is earning money by setting up exhibitions and with other odd jobs. He has had little contact with theatre to that point. The decision is purely pragmatic. The professor: an older gentleman in thrall to a different time, employed at the school out of charity. He wants the students to make copies of Wagner sets. His theatre history doesn’t even reach as far as Bertolt Brecht. A visit to the directing course brings Zehetgruber into initial contact with people like Caroline Weber, later Martin Kušej. It’s his voyeurism that attracts him to theatre, his passion for observation, the habits of people – their desires, their dislocations, their failures. He wants to create settings for them, set traps, raise barriers. He himself will later refer to his sets as “playgrounds”. They will be challenging. Adventure playgrounds, every one of them.
The basement. To save on rent, Zehetgruber moves into a cellar where the windows reveal nothing but the hurrying feet of passers-by. The toilet is off the stairs and regularly freezes in winter. He extends across the entire floor – it’s both studio and dormitory. He holds parties there. Legendary parties. A wild mix of guests. A place for the art scene to meet. Soon this location is well known in the city. Along with its host. BLACKOUT Forum Stadtpark. The avant-garde of Graz. The interdisciplinary art centre established in 1960 enjoys a reputation beyond Austria – primarily for the literary scene around Alfred Kolleritsch, but also for its visual artists and photographers. In Zehetgruber’s student years it also opens up for the performative, the theatrical. In this coveted site, he stages his first work with emerging director Caroline Weber: “Yes, Perhaps” (Graz 1983/see p. 26f.). An experimental play by Marguerite Duras. It uses future perfect for its narrative form and imagines a post-nuclear era. No matter what is presented, the two actresses reply with the constantly repeated phrase of astonishment: “yes, perhaps”. Martin Zehetgruber builds a cafe in the empty exhibition hall. It is only later – once everyone is comfortable – that the actual performance space becomes visible, outside in the park, through the panorama window. It is winter. Bare trees. The audience’s view is obstructed by a plastic sheet. It defines this zone wrested from the landscape, which – while real – has been transformed by this device into a space for contemplation, a space for discourse. Discussions and protest movements at the time were dominated by the fear of atomic catastrophe. Here the audience sat in the warm interior and observed their own decline. BLACKOUT Inside and outside. This duality will also be a strong influence on future designs. Outside as danger. Unpredictable. Looming. Challenging. Threatening. The protective interior is deceptive. Soon it will erupt in his stage designs, nature disgorging into interior spaces, a suspension of the threshold represented by the walls and doors whose function is to assuage the violence of the exterior world. It is only in the breach that the need for their protective presence is made visible. The place of refuge is soon submerged, this refuge of the self that exists precisely because it forms inside. Signs of disintegration in architecture, the world, identity. Lack of dependence on the ostensibly stable. Even the floors often fail to provide the desired support. Everything is revealed to be a fragile construction swept up in the maelstrom of time. In “Es” (“It”) for example, a drama by Karl Schönherr (Graz 1987) and the first production with Martin Kušej, the start of a collaboration that will last decades. A cardboard box room, bright. The meagre inventory: fetishes of memory. At the end of the performance water pours through the ceiling. Ceaselessly. In an excruciatingly long, silent scene, the audience is witness to the complete destruction of the interior space. BLACKOUT
Water. This becomes a defining element in Zehetgruber’s set designs. It keeps working its way in. In all its physical states and manifestations: as blocks of ice, as steam, as rain – drizzle, downpour, constant rain, cloudburst, thundery shower – as snow, blizzard or avalanche, as rivulet, river, torrent; as brackish waste water, rising ground water and diving pool. Zehetgruber becomes a specialist in the technical execution of these often challenging constructions. Empowered by the intangible heritage from his father and by civilian service at the firefighters’ training centre in Lebring. He will go on to recreate the practice diving pool there with various ensembles. BLACKOUT Water. It enables the containment of time in an image. BLACKOUT Water. Diving. Drowning. Submerging. Soaking. Freezing. Slipping. Challenging for the actors. It changes them, changes their movements, drives them to exhaustion, to an authentic state. Physicality is important to Zehetgruber, so too the sensuality that comes with it. BLACKOUT Water. The destructive force. He himself would have direct experience of this in Cividale when the little rivulet in which he placed his enormously heavy set design for “Franz Falsch F Falsch Dein Falsch Nichts Mehr Stille Tiefer Wald” (“Franz Wrong, F Wrong, Yours Wrong Nothing More, Calm, Deep Forest”, Cividale 1992/see p. 58ff.), swelled into a torrential river overnight, sweeping away all that stood in its path. BLACKOUT BLACKOUT. The depth of the black, the falling, the fathomless, the undefined, the nullity, the interruption, the void, the inaccessible. Blackout, in zero seconds between two scenes all spotlights turn off simultaneously, and this becomes one of Zehetgruber’s means. He develops it in collaboration with Kušej in their first joint work. The blackout allows a filmic, photographic view, the cut, the edit, the contrast. Motion and stasis. Bright darkness. Presence and absence. Scenes transforming as if by magic. The blackouts become a frame. The scene becomes an image, an extract, a fragment, a found object, lightning that strikes in the mind and in the heart. It leaves an afterimage in the darkness, lodged – inverted and invasive – in the viewer’s own thoughts.
Found rooms. The exhibition space, the park (“Yes, Perhaps”; Graz 1983/see p. 26f.), the recording studio (“Judith”, Klagenfurt 1987/see p. 30ff.), the painter’s studio (“Der Untergang der Titanic”; “The Sinking of the Titanic”, Graz 1988/see p. 34ff.), the container (“Tode”; “Deaths”, Graz 1990/see p. 50ff.),
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the river (“Franz Falsch …”, Cividale 1992/see p. 58ff.), the slaughterhouse (“Schneewittchen”; “Snow White”; Graz 1989), the machine room (“The Fall of the House of Usher”, Gladbeck 2021/see p. 240f.). The found setting is used and manipulated: the architecture, the perspectives, the elements, the temperature, the stench. In the slaughterhouse that Zehetgruber found for the production of “Schneewittchen”, a subtle short play by Robert Walser, there was a stench of blood, with routine operations continuing throughout the day in the neighbouring building. The bloodstains on the ground, witness to the previous function of this hall repurposed as a performance space, are sunk into the pores of the concrete like oil streaks in a garage. Zehetgruber mounted delicate fabric, rows of veils reaching to the ceiling, extending in stages to the depth of the space. One by one they were released, floating to the floor and revealing the monstrousness of the site. BLACKOUT Found rooms. No depictions. As mentioned. No recreation of found rooms on the stage. He was never interested in that. Even when he got his first offer from a major German theatre, the Residenztheater in Munich, he and Martin Kušej rejected the proposed play because it stipulated a naturalistic kitchen as the setting. They self-confidently proclaimed their disinterest on their debut visit. Artistic Director Günther Beelitz responded by gathering the whole dramaturgical team together and telling them, in the presence of the two artists: “Our two young stars think the play is shit. Suggestions please. Lots of suggestions.” They then placed a provocatively large pile of texts on the table on the condition that the two wouldn’t leave the theatre until they had made a decision. They sat there for a long time. The others smirked. They decided on Thomas Strittmatter’s play “Irrlichter - Schrittmacher” (“Will o’ the Wisps - Pacemakers”, Munich 1992/see p. 62f.). Zehetgruber had a VW Beetle set into the floor of the Marstall as though it had sunk into the asphalt. It was about traffic jams. Standstill. Future Stuttgart Artistic Director Friedrich Schirmer, who would soon bring the two Martins to his theatre, commented: “But you need to write ‘traffic jam’ so people recognise it.” But Zehetgruber was already worried that his sets were too forthcoming. Sometimes he had doubts. Were they too direct? For him they were concrete. Experience is always concrete. He pushed his doubts aside; ultimately they represented his view of things, his encounter with the text, the material, the world. Others would say they were surprised every time that the curtain went up and the lights went on. They never expected what was looking back at them. Zehetgruber seeks emotional reality – always – in contrast to a depiction of reality. “Spaces of decline. Prisons of the soul. Inclines of fate. Depths of humanity. Ruins of utopias. Dungeons of glass. Labyrinths of death. Spaces of fear.” – that’s how journalist Georg Diez once described Martin Zehetgruber’s sets. (Georg Diez: Martin Zehetgruber und das System der Räume. In: Georg Diez: “Gegenheimat. Das Theater des Martin Kušej”, Salzburg, Frankfurt, Vienna 2002). These are poetic worlds. Surreal landscapes of the soul that bear a secret. They have a life of their own, define the dramaturgy of the narrative with which they penetrate the gaps in the text, break them open, upend them, provoke. For Zehetgruber, the physical and mental experiences of a play are of equal validity. He lays tracks, signs from our western civilisation
and cultural history. Plus: he toys with uneasiness, with a somewhat absent presence, to activate the imaginative capacities of the audience, touches on fears, provokes expectations, manipulates awareness. His sets tell of conditions in a before or an after. Something has taken place or something is foretold. Something transformational. Nothing is as it was before. And for Zehetgruber there are no “constants”. His sets are in motion. The sets claim their own narrative level, they transform in the course of the performance, they surprise, disappear, remain elusive, defy their ostensibly stable materiality. Although every single one of them seems to be built for eternity. Zehetgruber has never been afraid of toil and effort. On the contrary. He demands it, because entire worlds are at stake, and the force it takes to destroy them. And the pain that this destruction leaves behind. Loss. BLACKOUT The space as subject. They bleed and sweat (“Straßenecke”; “Street Corner”, Stuttgart 1994). They age, their surfaces transform (“Richard III”, Berlin 1996/ see p. 76f. – here, humidity caused the oxidisation of the metallic colour in the sewage tunnel walls, through which the water flooded, depositing the dead in the orchestra pit.) BLACKOUT Beginning and end. They must remain fixed. “Old theatre rule” – Zehetgruber is also a technician of effect. The set designer allows himself the pleasure of encapsulating the entire play in an image, in a prologue, in a mini-drama, without words, for example in Peter Rosei’s “Tage des Königs” (“Days of the King”, Graz 1991) where he had an elephant cadaver pulled up out of the orchestra pit and into the flies. The audience is witness to this arduous process. Blackout. What you’ve actually seen and experienced – only at the end of the play does it become clear. For the final scene, in each case, the whole apparatus rotates. It is the joy of inducing wonder. There is something of the circus about it. A trick. Something unexpected which – you realise in retrospect – was foretold the whole time.
The architecture. Zehetgruber’s spaces influence the aesthetic of the performance, they extend into the bodies of the performers, determine their movements. The inclines. The liquid. The dizzying heights. The labyrinthine pathways. The confusing interleaving of the spaces. The constricted passageways and perspectives. The accumulation of objects on the floor. Especially the floor. The floor, over and over again. His floors are never dependable. They push against each other, stack on top of each other (“Theodor Herzog von Gothland”; “Duke Theodor von Gothland”, Stuttgart 1993), turn to slush (“Glaube und Heimat”; “Faith and Homeland”, Vienna 2001/see p. 102f.), are revealed as canvases that tear when you walk on them with the wrong footwear and send you to the depths, because they are built on top of other worlds, layers, strata, planes that only gradually become visible (“Brecht.”, Mannheim 1999/see p. 84ff.). They offer unsolid ground. Performing on these sets leaves traces on the body. And places it under extreme tension.
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They don’t offer security. Whole buildings collapse on them, go down on their knees, subside. BLACKOUT False bottoms. The Austrian range of associations: Kubin, Freud, C. G. Jung, Kampusch, Fritzl. Rechnitz. The horror behind the facade; the subconscious, the suppressed, the concealed, the buried. Unfathomable. In Zehetgruber’s sets there are floors above floors, walls before walls. In the course of the performance they open up and reveal the secrets of their structure, as in “Rusalka” (Munich 2010/ see p. 174ff.), for instance. BLACKOUT Boundlessness. Exertion. Dissipation. This is what Zehetgruber seeks. “There is nothing worse than the measured, the balanced,” he says, making it evident how quickly he can be overtaken by impatience and boredom. Only boundlessness implies the possibility of failure, reveals the flanks, allows for vulnerability. That’s where the drama, the theatricality comes from. BLACKOUT The working process. His sets are settlements. They don’t sidle up to a work, they don’t render themselves invisible, only seldom do they change in the rehearsal process – not these days, in any case. Their transformations are too sophisticated to allow open-ended improvisation. The preparation is meticulous, aided by detailed storyboards. This is important. Not just for communicating with the workshops, but also for development of processes. He doesn’t throw down a bunch of sketches and demand that others work out how to execute them; he knows the requirements and the opportunities. He may exploit them to the extreme, but he also knows the solutions. For this he is respected and valued by the workshops and technicians. He works with them to try things out, researches materials – he loves stage rehearsals just for the working through of technical effects. Which is barely possible these days. The theatre world is not exempt from the mindset of economic efficiency. Today he looks back wistfully on the shared hours in the workshops, the research, making the unfeasible feasible, creating stage miracles; boulders breaking through the ceiling (and not bouncing back up to reveal their materiality), people who climb up walls, walk upside down on the ceiling (without a flying rig) as in “Aller Seelen” (“All Souls”; Hamburg 2000/see p. 90f.), a performance by choreographer Johann Kresnik in which he addresses his life and his trauma; as a four year old he saw his father shot dead. He was bound to Kresnik through work and friendship, above all a deep understanding of the formative influence of childhood and homeland. There was a time when Zehetgruber often used his own two hands. That’s where the enhanced interest in simple technical solutions originates. He was also able to infect companies and individuals with this enthusiasm, they supported him “for free”. Would that still be possible today? He’s not asking for himself, but for his students whom he has been teaching since 2002 in his role as professor at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. He knows that the market he will eventually be releasing them to is different from the one he encountered when he began.
Ever since he formed a collective of life and art with Stefanie Wagner, there is no more peering into empty models. They act out their ideas to each other in a protected space. Even the unformed, the vague hunches. Each will pick up on the ideas tossed out by the other, think them through, play them back, review them. Zehetgruber draws them at the computer, Wagner builds them into a model, where they undergo their first transformation. That’s why the model is still one of the most important tools on the path to execution. Questions of surface and material require concrete answers. Dimensions have to be checked. The pair see themselves as one unit, as head and hands, switching roles. BLACKOUT Materials. There was a phase of experimentation with materials on stage: iron, tiles, asphalt (all three of which exerted a huge amount of weight), multiwall sheets (“Cleansed”, Stuttgart 1999/see p. 88f.), liquid wax (“Kill Pig Devil Passion Finish God”, Vienna/Graz 1994/see p. 66ff.) – kept liquid backstage with repurposed flow heaters – and various animal cadavers. At an animal sanctuary, Zehetgruber found a horse that was due to be slaughtered. He had it stuffed and laid on the stage (“the genuine article has a completely different aura. It now has a central part in the Jahnn play. The belly was cut open, the actors rolled around in it.” “Straßenecke. Ein Ort. Eine Handlung.” (“Street Corner. A Location. An Action.”, Stuttgart 1994/see p. 257). The press scandal was preprogrammed. “Why? Dead is dead.” I prefer not to mention the repose of the dead, dignity, our weird relationship with animals – I fear the charge of bigotry. I reflect that Zehetgruber was exposed to the influence of Viennese Actionism, which were still apparent during his time in Graz, a world with which he was familiar and which I only know from Ulrich Seidl films. For “Der Traum ein Leben” (“A Dream is Life”, Graz 1992) he had it raining fish, mackerel. A one-off experiment. For months they couldn’t get the stink of burst fish out of the stage floor at the Schauspielhaus Graz. Living animals are also part of the inventory. Pigeons, for instance, which defecated over everything – a desired effect, although the health authorities stepped in at the final rehearsals. He had oxen heads brought from the slaughterhouse and smashed on the stage, cerebral matter flying everywhere. Only no one noticed that it was a real skull – the archaicism that he aspired to, the unresponsive brutality was not amplified. On the contrary. He learns: “Authenticity cannot be substantiated on the stage.” Zehetgruber now values artificiality in the theatre, materials that purport to be something other than what they are. And that can achieve more, that can undergo demystification, for instance, or that come with a distinctly playful aura. And humour.
Humour. There hasn’t been enough of it in this text. Perhaps because it is such a painful humour, disguised all too well. In real life, Zehetgruber’s bright laughter is ever-present. It is laughter – a cackle, almost – about the impertinences of life.
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BLACKOUT Lie and veracity. “I don’t believe in veracity in theatre. It is only through the lie that truth comes to light.” BLACKOUT Question. Was he ever tempted to move away from the often difficult collective processes of the theatre and present his worlds in other contexts, autonomously? He is astonished. “No.” He builds the spaces, he says, “so others have something to play with.” He watches them as they do, wants to see what they do with them, how they get along with them. That alone is a pleasure. “Why would you bother with the whole Schoaß otherwise?” Theatre is a reason for coming together, for reaching agreement about some external factor, for celebrating, for forming temporary communities, for feeling togetherness, for enduring life together. BLACKOUT The dead. His father, his brother, his mother, the writer and friend from his Graz days Werner Schwab, the choreographer and artistic fellow traveller Johann Kresnik, the long-serving technical head of the Burgtheater Heinz Filar, the theatre dramaturge Wolfgang Wiens, the opera dramaturge Jens Schroth. BLACKOUT The artistic compansions. Stefanie Wagner (involved in everything he has done since they met in 2004), Jörg Koßdorff (his mentor, Technical Director and later Artistic Director in Graz), Klaus von Schwerin (who as stage manager masters the logistical challenges of his sets), Heinz Filar, Thomas Bautenbacher, Ernst Meissl, Hansi Krainz and the stage manager Peter Wiesinger at the Burgtheater and from the Stuttgarter Oper the technical head Michael Zimmermann as well as the head of the painting studio there, Lisa Fuss (standing in for all the ingenious technicians with a passionate flair for art). Caroline Weber, Martin Kušej, Johann Kresnik, Andrea Breth, Barbara Frey (the directors), Sylvia Brandl, Sebastian Huber, Helga Utz, Olaf Schmitt, Wolfgang Wiens, Andreas Karlaganis, Klaus Bertisch, Alexandra Althoff, Judith Gerstenberg (the dramaturges), Aglaia Voitl, Heidi Hackl, Heide Kastler, Esther Geremus, Werner Fritz (the costume designers), Alexander Koppelmann, Friedrich Rom, Reinhard Traub, Rainer Küng (the lighting designers), Bert Wrede (composer), Alexander Nefzger (sound designer), Hans Jörg Michel (photographer), Marc Günther, Gerhard Brunner, Friedrich Schirmer, Klaus Zehelein, Klaus Bachler, Jürgen Flimm, Karin Bergmann (artistic directors) and naturally all the actors and singers at the end, Buster Keaton. BLACKOUT
Works 1983 - 2022
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Yes, Perhaps by Marguerite Duras 1983 Forum Stadtpark / Graz
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Director: Caroline Weber
The Curious Ones by Carlo Manzoni Der Boden 411 (Ground 411) by Lutz Rathenow 1986 independent production / Zurich Theatersaal Karl der Große
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Director: Caroline Weber
Costume sketch
Judith by Kurt Franz 1987 klagenfurter ensemble
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Director: Martin Kušej
Facing the performance area
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Facing the entrance
Der Untergang der Titanic (The Sinking of the Titanic) by Hans Magnus Enzensberger 1988 Schauspielhaus Graz (former painting studio) Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Aglaia Foitl
035 The audience sits on an incline which is compensated by the seats of the folding chairs
Freezing armchair for the “Dreamer”
Cooling unit outside
0 min. - armchair before frost
120 min. - armchair heavily frozen
Armchair eventually becomes a lump of snow and ice
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45 min. - armchair visibly frozen
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Filming in the diving pool of the fire brigade training centre in Lebring near Graz
My friend Martin A conversation with Martin Kušej on shared beginnings in Graz
Martin Kušej, you and Martin Zehetgruber are bound by an artistic partnership that stretches back almost 40 years. It would be impossible to highlight all of your joint works. So I would like to talk to you about the beginning of your collaboration, because it strikes me as indicative of your future paths. You were both at the art school in Graz in the early 1980s, you studied directing, Martin Zehetgruber set design. How did you first start working together? Actually after all these years the whole thing is a bit foggy. In any case, we didn’t collaborate while we were studying, at that time I carried out my practical work without him. Outside of school, on the other hand, we saw a lot of each other and spent many – many, many – hours, days and nights in bars. The goal wasn’t at all to drink to excess, instead we would get together, ponder and talk. It was from these encounters that the decision to collaborate after our studies arose. But initially I spent a year in Salzburg as an assistant director, and he went to London. We would write to each other and exchange ideas and rough sketches for a range of plays. I really wanted to put on a production and I knew that with him I would have a strong set designer at my side, and I tried to make contacts anywhere I could. But for a while I couldn’t find anything in Austria, I was out of work and I went to Ljubljana, to Slovenia. You couldn’t make money there, but it was an important time for me, a search for identity. I am half Slovenian, which I only found out later; I learnt the language and got to make my first attempts in theatre. Zehetgruber would often travel down there to see what was going on, and then suddenly we got an offer from a theatre in Graz. Finally. The then Director of the Schauspielhaus, Rainer Hauer, asked if we would like to produce “Es” (“It”) by Karl Schönherr on the rehearsal stage. A two-hander. Naturally we wanted to do it. That’s when it all began. We ended up stuffing all the ideas that we had been storing up over the previous years into this performance, which is probably normal for a first work. Devising and developing together was the key. It was a protracted process – the two of us sat down with the text and we didn’t just discuss the space, the set design, but also the narrative style as a whole, the form, the things we found fascinating at the time in visual arts, in literature, in theory. Did you have the same interests or were you offering each other unfamiliar realms?
The Graz of the 1960s to the 1980s had a particular aura. Can you describe the atmosphere there at the time?
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I would say that we shared the same interests. We loved the same visual artists, photographers, early on we were excited by industrial ruins at a time when the cultural world hadn’t really discovered them, we read the French poststructuralists, saw the same films. And we both had our instinct, which wasn’t influenced by external forces. We completely pursued our own interests and we were utterly surprised when we came to Germany in the early 1990s to discover that many other theatre professionals had similar ideas. Frank Castorf, Christoph Marthaler – that’s when we first came into contact with their work.
I found Graz to be incredibly vibrant at the time. There was the legendary Forum Stadtpark around Alfred Kolleritsch, the festival steirischer herbst which made a real impact, attracting artists like Laurie Anderson and looking beyond individual disciplines – it really was the avant-garde. I mean you already had the Styria music festival. The city was buzzing. Offshoots of Viennese Actionism were still apparent, performing arts – a term that wasn’t yet applied to anything and everything, at the time it still really meant performance, actions that happened then and there and were not reproducible. They were our points of reference. As I say, we knew nothing about what was happening in the German theatre scene at the time. We weren’t looking to that at all. Graz, on the edge of the EU’s outer border of the time, was a protected, self-sufficient space, an ideal breeding ground. I was really proud of what we achieved in our ten years there. There was no pressure to go to Vienna or Berlin. Before we come to why you later nonetheless took this step that brought you to major theatres in Munich, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Berlin and back to Austria for the Salzburg Festival and to the Burgtheater, I would like to return to your first collaboration, the production “Es”. It contains elements that you would both develop further later on: the striking use of water on the stage, tableaux vivants, scenes interrupted by brief blackouts – an aesthetic tool that you still use in productions to this day. The idea came from the encounter with the text. We only wanted to keep slices of it, which greatly reduced the play. I think Karl Schönherr is an excellent playwright, something that I repeatedly tried to demonstrate later on, but we had to undermine the tendentious and ideological elements of the play. In the end the performance turned the feel of the text on its head, it read as a feminist testimony, which definitely didn’t accord with the intention of the writer, a nationalist chauvinist who fantasised about euthanasia. So you knew that you wanted to undermine the actual narrative. How did you develop the means to do that? The scenes were now very short, the idea was that they would suddenly erupt. Using the curtain would have been too ponderous. We tried a few different things. Eventually Zehetgruber mounted fluorescent tubes around the proscenium arch, the inner space, the middle class room was kept white. You could achieve a true blackout by blinding the audience, and in the meantime you could make set changes without being noticed. It was amazing. This cut divided the narrative into individual scenes and enabled the next scene to be set up. The set design was the visual memory of a middle class room with rough whitewashed walls, sparse furnishings – chair, table, microscope, radio and a photo of a sculpture by Arno Breker – with the middle of the back wall open to reveal a tree and the ceaseless rain that slowly seeped through the ceiling of the room during the performance. All the dreck flowed in and laid waste
to what had been a hermetically sealed interior world. I am really impressed by the effort that went into this rehearsal stage. And you were just beginners. How did you make it happen? Actually we always managed to get the technicians excited about our ideas. And with us they had fun. We partied a lot. Long-term friendships were forged and people knew that when we were there, it would always be fun and challenging. A not insignificant factor was also that Zehetgruber knew what was actually possible in terms of implementation and shared his methods – particularly in relation to water. He knew what he was talking about, or at least puzzled it out until he knew. Your treatment of Schönherr’s “Es” testifies to a self-confidence and an impulsion to use the theatre as an instrument of enlightenment, something apparent in most of your later joint works as well. Where does this come from? It was a desire to provoke. We wanted to question the reality that was presented to us and use the means of the theatre to break through the surface. At a sensual, emotional level, we wanted to bring about a change of perspective through the experience – our perspective during the rehearsal process, but of course the perspective of the audience during the performance as well. That remains my motivation and desire in directing to this day. How do you look behind the text, behind what is presented, how do you advance into unknown areas that can excite, agitate, frighten, fascinate, repel? The whole palette of emotions is welcome and important, because through them you can learn something about yourself and the world that forms you. We were always interested in having something befall the audience. The delightful thing about collaborating with Zehetgruber was that we would often discover something in the text, independently of each other, that aroused our hunting instinct. What does your collaboration look like in practice? What is the division of labour?
And eventually you formed your own group called My friend Martin. Was it just the two of you?
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It’s not so easy to say. It is constantly renegotiated – depending on the work, the situation, the space, the location where we want to create something. It was an incredibly fruitful, creative time back then, and we spurred each other on. I learned so much from him. I believe that applied in reverse as well. What you put on the stage, what you can think up, where you can go – sometimes he would define it, sometimes I would. Whenever one of us said: “I’m not doing it. Stupid play,” the other would come and say: “I have an idea for how we can crack it,” and then we would do it. When I was obstinate, perhaps because I was thinking too conventionally, all it would take is a few words from Martin and suddenly a whole world would emerge. We both experienced that, and it was actually the great thing about that time; it was a genuine artistic partnership.
Initially it was just the two of us. But to go back again for just a moment: the space was always entirely determinative for the production. After “Es” there were smaller commissions, such as “Judith” (see p. 30ff.) by Kurt Franz with the klagenfurter ensemble, a small independent theatre group. We found our performance space in a community college, it was a training space or a sound studio – not a theatrical space in any case. It was divided in two by a wall with windows. The text describes a dystopia. Everyone is dead apart from three survivors. It was uncomfortable for the audience; they had to stand and try to follow the dramatic action through the glass. Naturally it was much too small. So we set up televisions so you could see what was going on at the same time in the next room. Back then hardly anyone was working with video or live cameras on the stage. Playing with perception, with perspective is something we’ve always been interested in. In the early works, especially, it was actually the spatial solutions that primarily defined the audience situation. Yes, I’m sure that came about because of Der Wilde Mann. Der Wilde Mann was a former hotel and restaurant in Graz, attached to the art school, which hosted the directing, acting and set design classes while the actual school building was being refurbished. That means our lessons took place in a hotel. From the cellar to the attic, from the dance hall to the dining hall, kitchen, toilets, courtyard, street – it was all at our disposal, and we used it all. That was certainly a major influence on us. Then there was “Der Untergang der Titanic” (“The Sinking of the Titanic”, see p. 34ff.) by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in the painting studio of the Schauspielhaus Graz. You used this workshop for a theatre performance for the first time. You were off to a remarkable start. In the painting studio there was an opening in the floor from where they hoisted the rolled-up backdrops to work on them. This slot reminded us of the tear in the side of the Titanic. There was a large iron plate behind, a metal wall where we had water running down the whole time. The actors were lifted out of this slot on a pull rod. That was their entrance. There was an armchair that was slowly freezing over; in it sat Marianne Kopatz, a wonderful orator with a great voice, who narrated the Enzensberger text. Martin Zehetgruber mentioned that he built an unusually steep auditorium stand in the hall, which you both had to try out for two hours with the sceptical Artistic Director to prove it was feasible. It was supposed to give the audience the impression that they were sitting on the sinking ship. Zehetgruber chose folding chairs that provided a level seating surface even though you felt you were about to fall to the depths. You passed the test. All this effort – the water, the special auditorium stand, freezing furniture – would be scarcely imaginable for a C-class production today. I am always amazed by the tales of your joint works. As I say, we always managed to get the technical people on our side. They were always highly motivated. We would just be spinning round, trying different solutions for weeks at a time. We truly exhausted every option to the brink of impossibility, and sometimes beyond.
I’m very glad we did. The machinery really grated every time. Today, in my role as head of a theatre, I have to take the house’s needs into account as well. I try to make a lot of things possible, but I always have to prune the artists’ ideas and get them to compromise. It really hurts, because I recognise that something is lost in this rescaling. The times have changed. It is a paradox – although there is more money around, fewer things are possible. Was overextending the house your sport? No, it was more that we were obsessed by our ideas, the images that we had developed in the preparatory process. How does the performance start, how do we turn the actors into characters, where are we taking the story? Our joint discussions about it were always prep work for the rehearsals. We did it for so long that in the end we didn’t even need to do it any more. At some stage we didn’t have to keep reinventing theatre, we realised that we had arrived at a point where we trusted each other blindly. After almost 40 years we barely talk at all in the lead-up any more. Do you miss it? No. There’s a reason for it. We know each other very well.
We founded our production cooperative so we wouldn’t have to rely on commissions, which were fairly erratic. Our first play under the label was “Tode” (“Deaths”, Graz 1990/see p. 50ff.), a project for which we both went completely into debt and only paid off years later. The project took place in three containers. The audience stood in one; it was closed, attached to a truck and driven around the Graz trade fair car park until everyone was disoriented. Then the sides opened and one of the other containers would dock – they slowly drove towards the audience – in one was a man, in the other a woman. HE, dying of cancer, screaming out a monologue, SHE longing for suicide. The texts were by Samuel Beckett, Rainald Goetz and Franz Xaver Kroetz. HE was hung with a harness from a track in the ceiling which restricted his movements, SHE slowly dismantled her entire container. It was very complex, but the work became legendary. Unfortunately there were only five performances because the actors gave absolutely everything of themselves. So did we. But there is a video of the work that George Tabori saw. At the time he was leading the newly established Mittelfest in Cividale, northern Italy, and he invited us. That was the next catastrophe – two years later (“Franz Falsch F Falsch Dein Falsch Nichts Mehr Stille Tiefer Wald”; “Franz Wrong, F Wrong, Yours Wrong Nothing More, Calm, Deep Forest”, see p. 58ff.). We went there and we were meant to find a performance location. It was December, and even Friuli is inhospitable at that time of year. They showed us a cement factory, various halls, catacombs. Suddenly we were standing on a bridge looking down at a rivulet, we saw the gravel banks and we knew – this is where we wanted to perform. In the water. The festival was dedicated to Kafka, and so we – including dramaturge Silvia Brandl who had joined us – created a Kafka collage.
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So now we come to My friend Martin.
Together with the technical crew and participating actors, My friend Martin had grown to 25 members. The set design consisted of a metal cube that looked like an upside-down house in the river – the result of an accident, you might think, a flood. You could use it both inside and out. While this element was being built in Italy and installed in the water, I did swimming training with the actors every day in Graz before we actually rehearsed and thought through the situation on site. On the morning of the day we were supposed to be doing the final rehearsal, Zehetgruber rang and said, “The set is gone.” There had been heavy rain showers the night before and the creek had transformed into a raging torrent. Four and a half tonnes of steel were simply washed away. We all went there straight away and searched for the set with diving goggles and snorkels. We tried to save it so we had at least something to work with. It was just before the premiere. Together with the population of Cividale we tried to somehow pull the thing out with tractors, steel cables and technical relief helicopters. We kept the town on tenterhooks for a week. In the evenings we had wild parties. Our rescue attempt was in vain so we had to quickly develop a new production. That was an important lesson for me in open-air theatre. You soon arrive at flaming torches, that romance-of-nature vibe – awful. That is not an option. So this steel colossus was important in avoiding all that rubbish. Regardless. We thought up the craziest things – actors in fur coats walking in the water on ice skates. Unfortunately the coats became completely soaked with water, dragging down the actors who thrashed about and cut their calves with the blades. We had a hard time explaining that in the hospital. In any case before long everyone in the town knew us. Then the church got upset over a little nudity, and the rehearsals drew a lot of spectators, 500 spectators standing at a safe distance and watching us. It was the craziest and most intense time of my life, one in which life and theatre were inextricably intertwined. Why did you dissolve the group and ultimately make the switch to institutionalised theatre? Apart from avoiding debt, you must have realised that you were hardly going to be continuing this kind of work in publicly funded theatre. We didn’t realise that. We took our way of thinking and applied it there. We never rejected the institutionalised theatre. We wanted to conquer it for ourselves. The breakthrough was Grillparzer’s “Der Traum ein Leben” (“A Dream is Life”, 1992) at the Schauspielhaus Graz. Suddenly they all came to see it – Frank Castorf, Frank Baumbauer, Friedrich Schirmer etc. We first went to the Marstall in Munich and then switched permanently to Schirmer at the Staatsschauspiel Stuttgart. The found space was always formative for your productions. What changed when you were forced to confront the traditional, hierarchical relationship between stage and auditorium? Precisely, we never really engaged with restrictions. On top of that, I don’t see the traditional proscenium stage or arena as hierarchical; the goal is simply to allow the best view for the most amount of people. But you can also use it to manipulate them … We never left them in peace!
Zehetgruber’s set designs extend into the movement apparatus of the actors. They are physically very demanding, at times risky. You have to be very alert to move around them. You used that and always made fantastic use of the sets. The physical is always an important factor for me, in part probably because I was an athlete and a sports scientist before I began directing. We always took it to the limits, and tried to repeal the law of gravity. I often hung off climbing walls with the ensemble, dived into firefighter training pools or did other forms of training. For a long time we were also working with a dervish. Sometimes there were some really very dangerous things on stage. In “Kill Pig Devil Passion Finish God” (Vienna, Graz 1994/see p. 66ff.) the dancers performed at a height of five metres – without a net. We always prepped the actors properly, guided them carefully. That was the prerequisite. We were always responsible. But we always came up with tricks for getting round the safety rules. Even though you continue to work together, the relationship has changed. For me, the time that we have just been talking about is a very valuable memory and I wouldn’t have missed a second of it – despite the difficult moments, the complete exhaustion, the occasional failed idea and financial bankruptcy. But after 15, 20 years, this close working relationship had to fall apart at some stage. It’s probably inevitable. Today we have a different form of collaboration, which strikes me as a logical development. It is trusting, and determined by our shared experience that we carry around with us like luggage. Of my 110 productions, at least 70 of them I have done with Zehetgruber. When I look at the imagery of your joint work, it strikes me that it is also influenced by your background. The materiality, but also the catastrophic, violent, suppressed, rural. Nature breaking down, the barn, the mountains, the avalanches. Actually, that is probably a central point. We’re both Austrian provincials who wanted nothing more than to leave the stinking, musty provinces behind. But they are still lurking within us. For me probably even more so than for Zehetgruber. We both came from nowhere, but the circumstances in which we grew up were different. The catastrophic, the submerged is something more associated with him. In any case we have often worked through our background. That’s probably where the force and the rejection of compromise come from. Because some things in this process are not negotiable. Behind it is an existential need.
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Interview with Judith Gerstenberg.
051 Tode (Deaths) by My friend Martin 1990 Three transport containers / Messeparkplatz Graz Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Aglaia Foitl
The event of dying in a container theatre
The audience is ushered into a truck container, the container is closed, the truck starts moving. A video flickers on the 12 monitors set into the side of the container - a voyage that sets out from the mountains, continuing over hills, trough forests and across plains to the river, where the ferry awaits. The doors open. With a swelling roar of electronic percussion, the containers with the man and woman slowly approach each and of the audience conatiner. The man (Werner Fritz) is hanging upside down from a revolving suspension system on tracks; his space is lined with metal sheets.The woman (Marusa Oblakova) is standing upright in a cell that resmembles a corridor, with a wooden floor sloping down toward the audience. Both have white makeup and are wearing nothing but loincloths. Once their spaces dock with the audience container forming the intermediate element, the roar dies out. The dying begins.
As water constantly seeps into his container, the man struggles with death. He moves about, hanging from his rope, issuing monologues, whispering and roaring through the space: “Two cries, one of them silent,” he shouts at one stage. The silent cry is from the woman, who on the other side of the theatrical unit is by turns composed and bewildered as she faces death. She dresses, undresses again, calm at one point and running riot through the cell at another… At the end of the piece - it´s difficult to say how long it lasts, you lose track of time - this unit composed of man, woman and audience is torn apart. The light goes out. No one claps; as Günther Eich said, “you can taste the penny under your tongue” - we have just been transported across the Styx. Further performances: daily at 9:30 pm until 4 July at the Graz trade fair grounds car park, Fröhlchgasse. Get tickets! Werner Schandor
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This was the unsettling and impressive start of “Tode” (“Deaths”), by ”Project My Friend Martin”, which premiered at the Graz trade fair grounds on Fröhlichgasse on Wednesday evening. This independent theatre group, which along with Martin Kušej and the stage designer Martin Zehetgruber also includes Sylvia Brandl, Aglaia Foitl, Seppo Gründler, Josef Klammer, Klaus Feichtenberger, Heinz J. Schubert, Carmen Auer and Alexander Gartlhuber, presented drama beyond
theatrical conventions in a piece that emerged through a collective process. With elements of film, music, portrayal, depiction and movement, “Project My Friend Martin” reduced tragedy to its critical moment dying - and restored the inconceivability of an everyday event that is ever-present in the media yet still taboo, in a highly inventive performance which left a lasting impression.
Process sketch
Monitors
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First drafts
Container HE
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Container SHE
Franz Falsch F Falsch Dein Falsch Nichts Mehr Stille Tiefer Wald (Franz Wrong, F Wrong, Yours Wrong Nothing More, Calm, Deep Forest) based on texts by Franz Kafka 1992 Mittelfest, Cividale Natisone River
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Aglaia Lang
The still intact stage being set up on the banks of the Natisone River
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Rescue attempts after the flood
Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Werner Fritz
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Irrlichter - Schrittmacher (Will o’ the Wisps - Pacemakers) by Thomas Strittmatter 1992 Residenztheater Munich (Marstall)
Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love) by Friedrich Schiller 1993 Stadttheater Klagenfurt / Schauspiel Stuttgart
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Anne Marie Legenstein
Kill Pig Devil Passion Finish God Texts and montages by Martin Kušej / Joachim Klement / Sebastian Huber using passages from “American Psycho“ by Bret Easton Ellis et al. 1994 co-production of Schauspielhaus Graz / Ballett Graz / Vienna Festival / Tanz 94
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Elisabeth Rauner
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Wax runs down the rusted walls
The piece is as long as a short wash cycle
Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg) by Heinrich von Kleist 1994 Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heidi Hackl
Clavigo by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1995 Schauspiel Stuttgart
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heidi Hackl
Singer in the tank
King Arthur by Henry Purcell / John Dryden 1996 co-production Staatsoper Stuttgart / Schauspiel Stuttgart / Stuttgarter Ballett
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Conductor: Alan Hacker Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Nina Reichmann
Richard III by William Shakespeare 1996 Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heidi Hackl
Shine or die Andreas Schlager
Martin’s sets were real sparring partners for me. They required a lot of strength, but at the same time they supported me. Each time I faced the challenge of providing a counterpoint to the energy that his sets exude. You couldn’t just settle into his worlds, they were demanding. They often set specific, exhausting, physical tasks. As Ferdinand in “Kabale und Liebe” (“Intrigue and Love”, Klagenfurt 1993/see p. 64f.) I had to climb up the 45-degree incline over and over again to be beaten down by my father with a heavy winter coat. This was repeated forty times in the performance. On every performance day, I would already have an adrenaline rush in the morning. Honestly, I had a lot of respect. Martin’s sets demanded absolute vigilance and awareness. They gave us performers tremendous presence. They turned everything into a concrete process, you couldn’t just pretend. They pushed me to states that I had never experienced before. In survival mode, you’re not trying to set the right tone anymore, it’s just there. With “Oedipus” (Stuttgart 1997/see p. 80f.) there was nothing to seize hold of, anywhere. The set design consisted of nothing more than a few large floating light boxes showing fragments of sky, a blasted, damaged firmament, a shattered world, the remains of something in which the augurs had once sought orientation – otherwise the Stuttgart stage was completely empty. Friedrich Schirmer, the director, couldn’t believe it at the set rehearsal. Instead, Zehetgruber had the entire theatre building shrouded in a black cloth for each performance. The house became a mystical site. It changed the cityscape. Whenever I walked past it on the way to the stage door, the responsibility – I was playing the title character at the time – weighed heavily on my shoulders. I was greeted by a powerful statement to which I wanted to do justice.
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I have often performed on Zehetgruber’s sets. If you see your opportunity you can shine, otherwise you die.
Light boxes with cloud slides, above the audience as well
Oedipus by Sophocles 1997 Schauspiel Stuttgart
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heidi Hackl
Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heide Kastler
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Die Geier-Wally (The Vulture Maiden) by Wilhelmine von Hillern 1997 Schauspiel Stuttgart
085 Brecht. 1998 Nationaltheater Mannheim Director: Johann Kresnik Costumes: Heide Kastler
Cleansed by Sarah Kane 1999 Schauspiel Stuttgart
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heide Kastler
Aller Seelen (All Souls) after texts by Werner Fritsch 2000 Thalia Theater Hamburg Director: Johann Kresnik Costumes: Heide Kastler
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rope between wooden laths
Juriss´ 360° walk across wall + ceiling
Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heide Kastler
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The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg 2000 Thalia Theater Hamburg
Hamlet by William Shakespeare 2000 co-production Salzburg Festival / Schauspiel Stuttgart
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Bettina Walter
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The impossible and the unfathomable Heide Kastler
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I met Martin Zehetgruber in the mid-1990s at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. He was introduced to me as “Z”. Faded black 501 jeans, pointy boots, bushy moustache, soft leather jacket, very good sense of humour, intelligent and quite the drinker. It was a special encounter, we bonded immediately and we remain close friends to this day. I designed the costumes for about 25 productions that he also worked on. We have collaborated on drama, choreographic theatre and opera productions in Vienna at the Burgtheater, at the Residenztheater in Munich, at the Schauspielhaus and Thalia Theater in Hamburg, De Nationale Opera en Ballet Amsterdam, Opera Liceu in Barcelona, La Monnaie in Brussels, Opera Bastille in Paris, Opera Teatro Real in Madrid, Nationaltheater in Mannheim, Schauspiel Hannover, Staatstheater Stuttgart, Schauspiel Bonn and at the Salzburg Festival, and really spent a lot of time together; mainly in the theatre, in the studio, in restaurants, in bars, at final rehearsals, on vacations together. Martin Zehetgruber always makes an artistic statement with his spaces. He avoids props and anything extraneous. No decoration, no plush, no replicas of real, existing rooms. He wants to use his spaces to journey into the souls of the characters. He is interested in the abyss within people. His spatial arrangements always strike at the core of the story, which he makes visually experiential for the audience. He heightens, exaggerates and reduces at the same time. I am thinking, for example, of “Weibsteufel” (“The She-Devil”, Vienna 2008/see p. 170f.), a production at the Akademietheater. With short phrases, with archaic austerity, playwright Karl Schönherr tells the story of three characters: woman, man, border guard. The setting: up in the mountains, on the border, down in the valley. Martin found a way to translate this: oversized tree trunks, stacked on top of each other seemingly at random, as if they had been swept away by an avalanche. Aftermath of a disaster. With this he had uncovered the heart of the play. The hazard, the impossibility, the desire, the fall – everything was there and at the same time it was very sexy. The archaic text corresponded with the power of the set design. The audience experienced the drama of the characters physically! I always find that to be a speciality of Martin’s spaces. Everyone on the team immediately fell in love with the design and we did everything we could so the actors could perform unsecured on the set. They needed good footing on the trunks and they couldn’t slip. I still remember really getting to grips with a wide selection of soles, carrying out lots of tests until I found the perfect sole for these special requirements. Fortunately, audiences don’t have to think about what it takes to perform on these slanting, round trunks. There were also short blackouts between scenes, the actors even changed position on the trunks in the darkness! Try standing on one leg and closing your eyes and you’ll see what I mean. An incredible acting achievement in every respect by Birgit Minichmayr, Werner Wölbern and Nicholas Ofczarek (as well as Tobias Moretti, who later took over Ofczarek’s role.
For Martin Zehetgruber it is always very important that the sets be in place for the rehearsals. That means the actors can physically engage with them early on, and assimilate them. To stick with Schönherr: “Glaube und Heimat” (“Faith and Homeland”, Vienna 2001/ see p. 102f.), a story of a Tyrolean family who are forcibly expelled from their country because of their religious beliefs. Martin Zehetgruber had the idea that it should be raining continuously throughout the performance, that the stage floor should be made of topsoil. Another design that at first seemed impossible to implement. Two hours of rain, the large stage of the Burgtheater knee-deep in soil! The weight of soil and water is an immense challenge on a theatre stage! You have to build tubs, and all the corridors to the dressing rooms were lined with plastic sheeting. The actors’ dressing rooms looked like quarantine stations. The wet earth had spread everywhere. Because of the wet, cold conditions, the actors wore thin wetsuits or mohair underwear under their costumes. We had quadruples of some costumes because the dark soil, water and sweat completely dissolved the material. They had to replace the washing machines after that production. Backstage it looked like a battlefield. The dirt, the constant rain, the wet earth created a bizarre atmosphere, the performers became increasingly muddy, their characters underwent a physical transformation that reflected the passage of time and their psychological condition. With this spatial design, Martin Zehetgruber had already related so much about flight, homelessness, war, desperation, expulsion and cold! His sets always allowed me a great deal of creative freedom when it came to designing costumes. However, the floors he designed were a challenge almost every time. I became a specialist in soles over the course of our collaboration. I loved finding inspiration beyond the classic “theatre sole” – from surfboards, climbing shoes and heels I made myself. Stage floors covered with water (wet, slippery), dirt (squidgy), blood (very slippery), grating (no high heels!), sculpture as performance space (heels, slippery), revolving stages (the sound level as you walk). But also a rain of blood (“Aller Seelen”; “All Souls”, Hamburg 2000/see p. 90f.), black rain (“The Master Builder”, Hamburg 2009/see p. 172f.), burning costumes (“Don Giovanni”, Salzburg 2002/see p. 106f.), mud fights (“The Wars of the Roses”, Vienna 2010/see p. 166f.), paint bombs that were thrown at the characters (“Der fliegende Holländer”; “The Flying Dutchman”, Amsterdam 2011/see p. 180ff.) etc. were of course a real challenge for me in the choice of materials, as well as the actual costume design. Unlike film, theatre has to be “repeatable”. The set and the costume have to be restored to their original condition for the next performance. Blood-spattered clothes have to look “new and unused” the next day – innocent, as it were. For me, Martin Zehetgruber is an artist of exception. Our long time together has shaped my understanding of theatre and sharpened my perspective. For that I am very grateful.
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heide Kastler
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Glaube und Heimat (Faith and Homeland) by Karl Schönherr 2001 Burgtheater Vienna
Glaube Liebe Hoffnung (Faith, Hope and Charity) by Ödön von Horváth 1990 Slovenian National Theatre Ljubljana / 2002 Burgtheater Vienna Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: 1990 Leo Kulaš / 2002 Heidi Hackl
Video projection of passing clouds throughout the performance
Floor covered with 5 cm thick foam beneath truck tarpaulin
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Orchestra pit with tank
Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 2002 Salzburg Festival
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Conductor: Nikolaus Harnoncourt Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heide Kastler
Compromise? Never. A conversation with Klaus von Schwerin
I would be interested to hear about your view of Martin Zehetgruber’s sets from the stage manager’s desk. They are constantly in motion and I am sure some changes and conversions often demand a lot of you. Martin Zehetgruber is certainly not one of your minimalist or compliantly obvious “stage decorators”. He always wants a lot. He always wants it big. And there is always something he wants to say with it. Is he prepared to compromise in collaborations? Zehetgruber? Compromise? Never, or very rarely. At the technical set-up, or even at the set rehearsal, I get the first drops of sweat on my forehead. And often the first critical remarks and stifled curses. But naturally in a jovial, collegial spirit and in the clear knowledge of absolute futility. Ultimately we are friends beyond the theatre as well. These negotiations about feasibility, how do they actually transpire? Well, I ask him if he can start thinking at the drawing board stage about whether his ideas are actually viable given the conditions at hand. For example, in Salzburg, in the salt works on the Pernerinsel for “König Ottokars Glück und Ende” (“The Rise and Fall of King Ottokar”, Salzburg/Vienna 2005/see p. 136ff.) he wanted to bring five cars into position without a sound during the performance, and have a hundred podiums built with wings of 2.20 metres at most – while upstage Tobias Moretti quietly delivered his monologue and 25 extras were waiting at their marks the whole time. He was unfazed? To begin with he was. It was only the installation of the podiums that we managed to talk him out of, but there were highly pragmatic reasons. Anyone who knows Salzburg knows that it rains constantly, and the podiums would have been stored out in the open, and would then have to be brought wet and slippery to the stage. So the rolled-out dancefloor was the safer alternative. Laying it out without gaps during the performance was challenge enough. Before that a large, walk-in truck that filled the entire width of the stage and was pulled by pulleys from the flies had to drive forward slowly and place the predetermined breaking point of a falling wall precisely above the throne. On it sat King Ottokar, watching his historic downfall and trustingly waiting for the wall to fall at every performance. An impressive image, so too the cars that then suddenly appear.
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Before that my stage manager’s desk was under the cars, which weighed a fair bit even without their engines. They hung up in the air on chain hoists and waited there until the time for the rebuild, or “their entrance”. There was simply no room for them below. That was a very queasy feeling. The technicians gently lowered them by manual control to the right position and manoeuvred them,
almost floating, to their marks. But Zehetgruber wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if we had to break the cars down into parts and put them together again there and then during the performance. Silently, of course, or with the help of David Copperfield! Ultimately everyone knows: if Martin wants something and the director supports his idea, we have to find a solution. And so far we always have. When it all works out, it’s enjoyable too. I really have to say that. I love theatre that can do things – the enchanting, the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, the seemingly impossible. Only a handful of artistic teams can do that these days, otherwise they’re largely from other disciplines or helping out short term, and have never learned how to create poetry and magic on the stage. And perhaps they don’t want too, either? Yes, perhaps it’s finished. But most of them couldn’t do it any more if they wanted to.
Klaus von Schwerin is a long-term companion, esteemed critic and one of the most important partners in Martin Zehetgruber’s working life. Many times he will be coordinating the challenges of the complex stage space from the stage manager’s desk, finding solutions where there aren’t actually solutions to be found. There are a lot of stories. We’ll have to limit ourselves. One of the sets where he was responsible for some magical moments was “Letzter Ausruf” (Last Call”, Vienna 2002/see p. 112ff.) by Albert Ostermaier, in the original production directed by Andrea Breth.
What particular challenges did this design present you with? Zehetgruber designed a space stage, a space within a space, a round enclosure in the middle of which the audience sat on rotating chairs. Around them was a twostorey ring with many different performance spaces, a 360-degree panorama. The spaces were opened and closed with sliding doors. The play consisted of numerous loose scenes which played with the simultaneity of events in a non-place, a place of transit, where people encounter each other in a huge range of configurations. The whole thing took place on the rehearsal stage of the Burgtheater, on the Arsenal site, because it would have been impossible for a repertory theatre to mount and dismount it. All the equipment had to be brought in, there was nothing by way of technology there to begin with. The Artistic Director Klaus Bachler found this spatial experiment interesting, which is why he was extremely generous with resources, financial but also spatial. Rehearsals for other productions had to be relocated and a shuttle bus put on for the audience.
The play was set in an airport. And Zehetgruber really did bring in everything you would find there: luggage carousel, escalator, showers, elevators, car park and so on and so forth. Naturally everything had to actually work. The performance spaces were hidden behind sliding doors and were supposed to open as if by magic, one after the other, two at a time, first one, then two somewhere else, one lower right, four upper left. The openings – half open or fully open, fast or slow – were supposed to be choreographed. It was a real door ballet, the doors would close at the end of a line, open at the start of another, mark pauses. There was also water involved. At the end, a giant dock door opened to reveal a screen on which you saw the projection of a plane taking off. The audience had the impression that they were in the middle of the runway.
Interview with Judith Gerstenberg.
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So I had the perplexing task of working out how to move all the doors, in sequence, in parallel, staggered, rapid, smooth. We couldn’t get technicians out there because they were all needed for performances in the Burgtheater, Akademietheater and the Kasino. We only had a small team who were meant to coordinate 150 door movements. Naturally these processes were supposed to happen silently. At first I had no idea what to do and I asked Zehetgruber – how, if you please, did you envisage this? Often when you first see his designs there’s a slight agitation, but you soon calm down and work closely together. Often the whole thing ends with a very amicable evening over pine liqueur or Vogelbeerschnaps. And with Zehetgruber, you usually achieve what he wanted at the beginning, and you are a little more reconciled to feasibility and have the feeling you’ve found a consensus. In this case we also had a huge number of extras who were fitted with radios, who I rehearsed with. I built a “control centre” from where I could manage everything. I had to devise my own notation so I could depict all the parallel actions on the stage manager’s desk. I had multiple cameras monitoring the entire stage space and I was in constant communication. Then there was the work of the ensemble, which wasn’t exactly small, and lighting and sound. I still had to take care of that along with the 150 door actions, the deployment of the escalator, the elevator, the moving footway, the water. In the end I was surprised myself by the result. It was really fantastic, it all worked, even though the process was nerve-wracking, because things were changing all the time. The playwright sat in on the rehearsals and Andrea Breth got him to rewrite the scenes. He sat there in the dressing room with his laptop and constantly supplied new material. So I could always start again from the beginning with the extras. But it was a responsive, ambitious team, and I had a lot of respect for them. At the premiere everything worked like Swiss clockwork, everything joined up – truly magical. The audience was astonished that they didn’t hear the “engines” that drove the numerous door movements in the powerful machinery. That was the greatest compliment. I really had to laugh, because on my monitors I would have images of the extras standing behind the walls with their arses clenched, hardly daring to breathe and incredibly cautious with an inner stopwatch, headsets, all tensed up in case they got in the way of a line of sight, with the walls opening and closing, making this spell possible.
Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Françoise Clavel
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Letzter Aufruf (Last Call) by Albert Ostermaier 2002 Burgtheater Vienna (Arsenal)
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Heinz Filar at that time Technical Director Burgtheater
On the road to Utopia with Peer Gynt On the Kresnik / Zehetgruber team Christoph Klimke
In 1998 I see the world premiere of “Brecht.” (see p. 84ff.) at the Nationaltheater Mannheim. Hans Kresnik invites me to the premiere and I meet Martin Zehetgruber and I become immediately aware that the two are not just a team artistically; even more than that they are conjoined in a rare brand of complicity by humour, by the desire for earthly pleasures, by a wealth of temperament and a certain sense of mischief. I’m eager to join the duo. Zehetgruber’s set is visually strong, so too Kresnik’s direction, and I see that both of them think in images. The ending is unforgettable: Brecht’s women destroying life-size Brecht statues with lust and fury. It is lust and fury that unites the two Austrians. Kresnik, a generation older than his set designer, will have told him about his unloved homeland on long nights out in the pub, on trips together, and at the usual Kresnik talks before rehearsals. A man from the mountains goes out into the world to experience incredible adventures, a likeable eccentric who returns to his childhood sweetheart in the mountains at the end of his life’s journey.
So I radically shorten “Peer Gynt”, preserving its important characters for Kresnik to stage. In addition to the original text, I give them texts by Heiner Müller, Pier Paolo Pasolini and others, which brings other eccentrics to Martin Zehetgruber’s set: American astronauts and a boxing raven who explains the world until – like all annoying teachers – it is fried in chilli sauce and polished off. In the scholars’ club, Peer argues about truths with Marx, Kennedy, Nietzsche, Mother Teresa, Pope Wojtyla, Ulrike Meinhof and Gandhi. After preliminary rehearsals in Hannover we go to Hallein on the Pernerinsel, where our “Peer Gynt” premieres in 2003. The stage: a green lawn set against lowlands and mountains, until Peer pulls the lawn away and the mountains turn out to be a walk-through pantheon of gigantic heads of philosophers and ideologues, both left and right wing, which provide a setting for the action. This is where “Peer Gynt” unfolds,
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In 2003 Schauspiel Hannover, in cooperation with the Salzburg Festival, asked the choreographer and director Johann Kresnik if he wanted to stage Ibsen’s poetic, universal fairy tale “Peer Gynt” (see p. 120f.), and the house dramaturgy certainly drew parallels between Ibsen’s protagonist and Kresnik’s own life story. Indeed the Carinthian, born and raised on the Slovenian border, experienced an archaic childhood in the mountains, one that was to shape his powerful imagery, and at the end of his life he really would move back to his native St. Margarethen, above Bleiburg, where he built himself what Peer Gynt would refer to as his “cabin”. Kresnik started off as a toolmaker until he went to the Graz Theater by chance and became a dancer. With no training. His apprenticeship would later be a help to him on stages large and small, and he never lets set designers or technical directors fool him about what works and, above all, what ostensibly doesn’t work. A successful dancer who performed with George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, John Cranko and Maurice Béjart, he then became the inventor of choreographic theatre who would go down in dance history. In 2003, I know that the fantastical masses of text around Peer and his lovers, friends, enemies and trolls will not withstand Kresnik’s impatience. And that it is not the poetic, fairy-tale aspect alone that will inspire him to create his own incomparable images. Not a journey around the world, then, but a journey through ideologies right and left, through religions, before arriving at our current consumerist fascism.
this world that must be vanquished, discussed, destroyed and transformed. This is Peer Gynt’s mission. Martin Zehetgruber’s set is his settlement. The stage designer’s director (Styrian, Carinthian respectively) is one of the few who can manage to not just use these images with a strong textual impact, but who can provide his own additions or contrasts to this Zehetgruber aesthetic. Heide Kastler’s costumes are not mere costumes but, like the set, strong textual symbols. Peer Gynt and the trolls wear giant boots which symbolise their travels through time, space and thought. The Troll King’s people (Kresnik’s dancers) are crowned with antlers. Their canon of movements is animalistic and archaic, like a voodoo dance. The music (by Serge Weber) is inspired by the Nordic Sami. The overall image – stage, costumes, music – coheres to form a text of its own. In the evening get-togethers during rehearsal time – with lots of beer and wine – we decide that instead of having Peer conquer Morocco we will have astronauts armed with the American flag occupy Zehetgruber’s lunar landscape. In the storm scene, inflatable boats drop from the Hallein hall ceiling, inflate and set off. Thousands of tin cans suddenly drop onto the stage in a thunderous roar. And towards the end, our three Peers climb over mountains of bones on the rubble of history. This Peer Gynt is in search of a home, a home of love, insight, knowledge or doubt. Knowledge makes him rich, his experience too. His mission becomes his home. The homelessness in the image of the seemingly dead bald heads that are briefly revived, wandering around in worlds of ideas, through Sturm und Drang, the homecoming not as nostalgia but as a return to values not subjected to profit maximisation – here the set designer and director complement each other perfectly. And Zehetgruber’s space helps Kresnik, who doesn’t like pure spoken or psychological theatre, to achieve his own physical theatre impact. After our “Peer Gynt”, Zehetgruber designed the set for a piece of choreographic theatre by Hans Kresnik at Oper Bonn in 2004, a piece about Hannelore Kohl with Kresnik’s company, which was moving from the Volksbühne to the Rhine. We always met an hour before the rehearsal, as we did in Hallein. I would summarise the scene that we would be running through that day. Kresnik would pull out his pen and sketch the scenes. Zehetgruber’s set design reflects or amplifies the stench of the Bonn Republic, which flows from the pores of the panels in Oper Bonn. Essentially he inscribes the architecture of the theatre in the set. I tell the team about the funeral of the Chancellor’s wife. The news bulletin shows Helmut Kohl laying a wreath at her grave. The ribbon reads, “Thank you! Helmut”. After her suicide this strike us as ambiguous, to say the least. At the end of the choreographic performance, Zehetgruber, as ever, draws a strong conclusion: in the scene where the woman with the light allergy commits suicide, the audience is blinded by thousands of lightbulbs from the rear wall. The protagonist dies. Suddenly only the neon sign remains: Thank you. Blackout. Here, as in “Brecht.” and “Peer Gynt”, homelessness is a threat, but it is also a mission that takes you to another world in which there is more at stake than value add. There is never a solution. Not in the direction, not in the set, maybe in the minds of the audience.
Zehetgruber the university lecturer invites us to Stuttgart to conduct a workshop with his students. The subject: Gudrun Ensslin. I write the libretto, the set design class develops models. We decide which of them will be implemented. A radical space: all white, made of styrofoam. The material is used for everything – the floor, the walls, the steps on which the audience sits. At the end of the performance, the room will be a battlefield. A very Zehetgruber conclusion. “The books of today are the deeds of tomorrow,” said Heinrich Mann. Yet Johann Kresnik, a communist at heart, definitely saw a political mission in his art. Like Pasolini, on the road to Utopia he knows: “And there was such a fine red back then!” Even in the theatre. Our version of “Peer Gynt” was a journey there for the whole team. And maybe art really is the last utopia. For a while, Kresnik and Zehetgruber pursued that journey together. One more of an aesthete, the other more of an anarchist. With “Hannelore Kohl” and “Gudrun Ensslin” the team set historical images in motion. And with “Peer Gynt” they turned saints upside down. That’s the only way they can move, after all.
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After “Peer Gynt” the team should have ventured further trips to Utopia. Kresnik’s fury was agreeably contagious for Martin Zehetgruber and they were already united by their love-hate relationship with Austria. And that’s how two homeless partisans of fury found their way from the mountains to a mutually enriching world of imagery.
Peer Gynt after Henrik Ibsen 2003 co-production Salzburg Festival / Schauspiel Hannover
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Director: Johann Kresnik Costumes: Heide Kastler
Artistic encounter On the collaboration with lighting designer Alexander Koppelmann Judith Gerstenberg
2004. Burgtheater. Friedrich Schiller. “Don Carlos” (see p. 126ff.). Director Andrea Breth is working with Martin Zehetgruber for the second time, following the world premiere of Albert Ostermaier’s “Letzter Aufruf” (Last Call; see p. 112ff.). Another twenty highly successful joint productions will follow. She invites lighting designer Alexander Koppelmann to join the artistic team. He is a trusted, valued partner after their years together at the Berlin Schaubühne. “Martin’s set design was a total declaration of war on light,” Alexander Koppelmann recalls. And in particular a declaration of war on him, Koppelmann, who has had difficulties with three-dimensional vision since childhood due to an eye condition – a limitation for which he pays in everyday life with numerous bruises and minor accidents, but which he endures in the theatre – this place of artificially created worlds which offers the opportunity of cultivating attention to the utmost, a pronounced sensitivity for spatial principles of order. Alexander Koppelmann has to explore the structures for himself, scan the spaces, discover their laws, their secrets, the potential for events within them. This he does cautiously, with respect, “just like you approach someone you don’t yet know”. It is because his job is to set light and shade, to determine direction and distances, that spaces first become tangible and recognisable – he no longer gets lost in shapeless expanses or confronts flat planes. You might say that his choice of career is a trick of survival that allows him to orient himself in space and time using the tools available to him there. Alexander Koppelmann calls his head a calculator that is constantly required to determine dimensions and distances. It’s an effort, and it takes time. So the sets have to inspire him, challenge him, draw him in. It is an act of research each time. So the difficulties that arose from the materials that Martin Zehetgruber planned for the set of “Don Carlos” and the complexity around the construction were both horror and pleasure for him. The set design was impossible to light. That’s why Andrea Breth asked him to do it. Martin Zehetgruber had designed a labyrinthine network, Kafkaesque bureaucratic architecture, a hall of mirrors made of lightcoloured walls and Plexiglas panes (“… which soon reflects every spotlight many times over!”) on a revolving stage (“Everything in constant motion!”), with the aim of making orientation impossible (“… I saw it as my job to maintain this impression and at the same time to precisely focus attention on the depths of this nested space”) and evoke surprise with astonishing conversions (“How do you keep a lid on these theatrical miracles and still ensure that no one falls into the understage?”). The complexity of the architecture, the transitions and revolutions were difficult to penetrate and took him days to comprehend.
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In his review of Andrea Breth’s hugely acclaimed production (6 May 2004 in DIE ZEIT), Michael Skasa devoted a large portion of the column inches available to him to a description of this stage design – with good reason, as it ultimately had a fundamental narrative role in this oppressive play about fear and power.
“Embers in the cold store” was the title of the review: “An infrared mosquito grill rattles and kills whatever dares fly about the open air. On the ground, King Philip reigns supreme, everywhere, including his summer residence Aranjuez, where nature has solidified into glistening drapes in aged brass lamé; in the lounge are 15 white leather club armchairs facing a television showing wild pounding waves. (…) Then it’s back home to Madrid, to what is both corporate headquarters and home, devastating in its purposeful sobriety. Glazed office cubicles under neon boxes in matt white lacquered frames, nested on the revolving stage, opening up to reveal walkways and – as the rear turns to the front – revealing new chambers, honeycombs and dungeons in what is evidently a multi-space control centre of power: a filing cabinet registry (where Philip reviews the ‘great ones of his kingdom’ in the hanging files at night), a cubicle stuffed with palm trees serving as a conservatory (Princess Eboli’s love chamber, guarded by four Great Danes who occasionally lash out), a conference and dining table of repellent extent to keep both friend and foe at bay. But you can always make out shadowy onlookers and eavesdroppers behind the glass panes. At one point (after the announcement of an auto-da-fé), the glass cubes revolve, glowing, and a horse carcass, its back still smouldering, floats past; at another point, after some subjects have stumbled through the corridors muttering in revolt, grey human corpses revolve around the stage.” Working on “Don Carlos” was ultimately exhilarating, but an extremely exhausting process. Martin Zehetgruber and Alexander Koppelmann passed through all the stages of an initial artistic encounter. “I was familiar with the way the Schaubühne worked, where you had a team of technicians, prop managers, makeup artists and so on who took responsibility from the first rehearsal to the last performance. No shifts, no change of personnel. Today’s theatres, on the other hand, function like factories. Time is limited, everything revolves around efficiency. My will and ability to function within that space is finite. We hadn’t even finished lighting the first scene before we used up half of our allotted lighting time, and I think Martin had a nervous breakdown. Understandably.” In the meantime, the two appreciate each other, trust each other’s work, and understand each other’s idioms. Critics regularly applaud the congenial collaboration of this artistic team, which would reunite again and again over the years at opera houses in Holland, Belgium and France. Martin Zehetgruber and Alexander Koppelmann see themselves as a courting couple, because they both shy away from using too many words, both retain their secrets. They are united by a passion for precision, a recognition of critical things which others regard as irrelevant or overlook entirely, fervour to the point of exhaustion for the realisation of an idea that they believe in, an aversion to pragmatism and compromise, the knowledge of space as a fleeting something, snatched from emptiness and time, in which they are witnesses to each other’s perception. To have found each other here means a lot to them. The older he gets, the more surprised he is, says Alexander Koppelmann, that you can even meet someone who sees the same things as you do. That is by no means a matter of course.
They are familiar with each other and yet each of their many joint productions is a way of getting to know each other – from the beginning, every time. It remains a convergence, an investigation, a respectful, almost tender act where one seeks to disclose the ideas of the other, let the space reveal itself, examine it and discover its possibilities. There is no fast track, no formula, just experience and dedication.
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Zehetgruber’s sets are especially dependent on light. It is their essential component. He thinks about this element from the start, works it through, in analogue in the model, virtually on the computer. The preparations, especially the set models that Zehetgruber and Stefanie Wagner make, are exceptional, says Alexander Koppelmann. This is rare and something he truly appreciates. Three weeks before the actual lighting rehearsals are scheduled, he is already on the rehearsal stage. He has to see what is developing, where it is going, the thoughts that are in the air, the goal that is being pursued, the changes that are occurring. When he sets the lighting, he is completely focused, almost autistic, he ignores everything around him (“literally”), only the channel to the operator and to Zehetgruber remains open. That’s when the manipulation of conscious and unconscious perception begins, this blurring of the distinction between reality and dreams, the animation and enlivening of spaces before the first performers enter them.
127 Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller 2004 Burgtheater Vienna Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Françoise Clavel
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heide Kastler
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König Ottokars Glück und Ende (The Rise and Fall of King Ottokar) by Franz Grillparzer 2005 co-production Salzburg Festival / Burgtheater Vienna
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145 Nach den Klippen (After the Cliffs) by Albert Ostermaier 2005 Akademietheater Vienna Regie: Andrea Breth Costumes: Dajana Dorfmayr
Höllenangst (Hellish Fear) by Johann Nepomuk Nestroy 2006 co-production Salzburg Festival / Burgtheater Vienna
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heide Kastler Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Lady Macbeth of Mzensk by Dmitri D. Schostakowitsch
2006 Nationale Opera en Ballet Amsterdam Conductor: Mariss Jansons 2009 Opéra Bastille Paris Conductor: Hartmut Haenchen 2011 Teatro Real Madrid Conductor: Hartmut Haenchen 2017 Teatro di San Carlo Neapel Conductor: Jura Valcuha
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heide Kastler Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Woyzeck by Georg Büchner 2007 Residenztheater Munich
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Su Sigmund Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
Macbeth by Giuseppe Verdi 2008 Bayerische Staatsoper Munich
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Conductor: Nicola Luisotti Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Werner Fritz Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Macbeth by William Shakespeare 2008 Akademietheater Vienna
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Director: Stephan Kimmig Costumes: Katharina Kownatzki Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
Director: Stephan Kimmig Costumes: Heide Kastler Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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The Wars of the Roses by William Shakespeare 2008 Burgtheater Vienna
I always felt like his spaces had their own life stories Nicholas Ofczarek
Martin Zehetgruber’s spaces truly are spaces. Accessible, experiential. It may come as a surprise that I would even mention that, but actually I have found myself in plenty of sets that have no depth, which give you nothing as an actor. His, on the other hand, always have depth – literally and figuratively. They present a challenge. I have to engage with them, I can’t ignore them. And the director always has to establish a relation to them. He simply throws something at us and watches what we do with it – this “something” is emphatic, it is strong, always thought through and drawn from the narrative. His work equates to an act of translation, making the text spatial, multi-dimensional. It gives you the feeling that you can move about in the text. You can experience it physically, discover it. Zehetgruber’s spaces – I speak advisedly of spaces rather than sets – don’t just express themselves textually, they also enable a sensual experience. They exude energy, hold tension. Zehetgruber ensures it. He revolves everything around a precise point so that these tensions arise. Sometimes it’s a question of millimetres. And his spaces are open, they more or less formulate openness. They allow the possibility of performing over distance, using the diagonal. They CREATE space. They have dead zones, certainly, but always places that have their own power, that ignite you as an actor when you come into contact with them. You’re certain to find these points in all his sets, you just have to explore them and discover them. It’s more a case of feeling them than seeing them, or putting a precise name to them. And then there is the violence. All of his spaces have something violent about them. They exude an indefinable menace. Again it isn’t something you can express, it’s something you feel physically. As an actor you are subjected to them – in a good way. You feel like you’re under a magnifying glass. In the space for “Der Weibsteufel” (“The She-Devil”, Vienna 2008/see p. 170f.), for instance, probably the best set in which I’ve ever performed, I felt like I was in a terrarium. There was a force and a depth that could make you feel lost, but also magnify you, because you were impelled to act, to action. The sets demand something of you.
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I always felt like Zehetgruber’s spaces had their own life stories, as though they were subjects which respond, develop, subjects that have a past – and a future. Subjects that we experience at a decisive turning point of their existence. The spaces are often hybrids as well, they are both interior and exterior worlds, they retain secrets and promises. That makes them inherently dramatic. Throughout the performance they undergo something, and so do the characters and the actors who inhabit them. I have always experienced his sets as encounters.
Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heide Kastler Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Der Weibsteufel (The She-Devil) by Karl Schönherr 2008 Akademietheater Vienna
The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen 2009 Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heide Kastler Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
RUSALKA / ACT 1. + 3.(1)
Rusalka by Antonín Dvořák 2010 Bayerische Staatsoper Munich
Conductor: Tomáš Hanus Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heidi Hackl Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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RUSALKA / ACT 1 + 3 / Basement raised
RUSALKA / A C T 2 / Beginning
RUSALKA / ACT 3 / End
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RUSALKA / A C T 2 / Wedding
Lulu by Frank Wedekind 2010 Schauspiel Frankfurt
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Director: Stephan Kimmig Costumes: Anja Rabes Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) by Richard Wagner 2010 Nationale Opera en Ballet Amsterdam
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Conductor: Hartmut Haenchen Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heide Kastler Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Wozzeck by Alban Berg 2011 Staatsoper in the Schiller Theater Berlin Conductor: Daniel Barenboim Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Silke Willrett, Marc Weeger Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Zwischenfälle (Incidents) Scenes by Georges Courteline, Pierre Henri Cami, Daniil Charms 2011 Akademietheater Vienna
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Director: Andrea Breth Version: Wolfgang Wiens Costumes: Moidele Bickel Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg) by Heinrich von Kleist 2012 co-production Salzburg Festival / Burgtheater Vienna
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Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Moidele Bickel Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
Conductor: Adam Fischer Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Moidele Bickel Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi 2012 La Monnaie Brussels
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La forza del destino von Giuseppe Verdi 2013 Bayerische Staatsoper Munich
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Conductor: Asher Fisch Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heidi Hackl Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
The spaces became images, the images began to flow, the flow became music Georg Nigl
You move about Martin Zehetgruber’s sets like you would a landscape. There are not many set designers who support the performer’s imagination like that, the being in the now. There was a scene from “Il prigioniero” (see p. 220ff.) that I still remember very well. In it I had to sing a beautiful aria in which I reflected retrospectively on my own imprisonment. The stage consisted of cages, and I was standing behind the bars facing the audience. From there I could see into my former dungeon and I was immediately catapulted into the condition of this memory. Perhaps that moment made even more of an impression on me on stage than it did on the audience. From the auditorium they had a view of a prisoner in a cage, but in this situation my gaze alighted upon the abyss of my past. I can sense Zehetgruber’s great empathy and his understanding of performance processes. I have the impression that the landscapes, the spaces, the playgrounds that he designs are places that he himself would like to inhabit, or has already, inside himself. They are suffused, lived-in, experienced. I greatly value his openness to dialogue with us performers and singers: how do you move in these spaces, how do you stand, how do you walk, how do they function acoustically? He approaches these questions with great earnestness, always responding to problems, sometimes changing but sometimes also convincing you why it really has to be exactly the way he conceived for it to work. He also considers the acoustics – an essential part of any opera set design. In his work you always encounter interpreted spaces. They’re not ornaments, they’re not pretty backdrops, they’re never illustrations of the subject matter, instead they depict the experience of the character journeying through it.
It also worked wonderfully in Wolfgang Rihm’s “Jakob Lenz” (see p. 204ff.). Each scene was a different state. For me, in the scene where I was huddled on the bookshelf, it was like lying in a coffin. There was no need to talk about it at the rehearsal. There was blind understanding between director, set and performer. The image supported Lenz’s claustrophobic state. The set was a hit. That’s rare. The spaces became images, the images began to flow, the flow became music.
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Zehetgruber’s transformations and changes of scene, often made as film edits with blackouts and miraculous transformations, always exist in the flow of the music and the narrative. I experience them as highly precise dramatisations of conditions. Life, the life story, is one way. It’s something that’s not easy to show on stage. How do you make movement along this trajectory experiential? As a singer, I am limited in my use of the spatial depth of the theatre space, since that distance comes with an acoustic loss, and simply moving about the lateral axis eventually becomes boring. So this method of cuts allows you to relate something that would otherwise be impossible to represent. References to film technique were particularly evident in “Wozzeck” (Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin 2011/see p. 186ff.). Alban Berg knew and appreciated the filmic arts, and the subject matter remained a fragment, so this editing technique was absolutely essential.
Andrea Breth and Martin Zehetgruber made a brilliant team whenever they worked together, because Breth timed and handled the scenes perfectly. As a performer, I had great confidence in this constellation, you could depend on them, they motivated you. You can hardly ask for a better experience at rehearsals. As it happens, I also – the gravity of the work notwithstanding – developed trust through mucking around with Martin on the sidelines of the work. Andrea Breth’s utterly justified and strictly enforced credo of absolute calm and concentration during rehearsals challenged both of us in equal measure. We were united in the need to undermine it, through – to put it mildly – juvenile pranks. But they were highly liberating and cathartic. And this also resulted in something constructive on the stage. When you play a psychiatric case for five weeks, you have to vent every now and then and remind yourselves that you have agreed to play together. One of the most incredible, beautiful theatre moments of my life I owe to Andrea Breth’s staging of Wolfgang Rihm’s “Jakob Lenz” and Martin’s set design. We had performed in this production many times in Brussels and Stuttgart and we revived it in 2017 for the Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin. It was also the last production they put on at the Schiller Theater. We had unusually long rehearsals for a revival: two weeks. Walking through the city to the theatre, I would run through the text and there was one scene I would always stumble over. To us Lenz was already pathologised; it is at the end of the piece that he calls out to those around him, Oberlin and Kaufmann, for the first time: “Can’t you hear the voices?” And in this scene there is the line: “I am the prodigal son”. What’s special about Breth’s way of working is that she puts a comprehensive tool at your disposal during rehearsals, so that you could actually get through the performance on autopilot. She clarifies every single scene, plumbs their depths. But that wasn’t of any help in this case. So I would always get to this moment, to the line “I am the prodigal son”, and I didn’t know how to deliver it. Of course I thought of the analogies from Thomas Mann’s “Joseph and his Brothers” and the Bible passage with Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, but I just couldn’t assimilate that line into my body. And it was something that Andrea complained about at every rehearsal. I was getting desperate, after all it was the conclusion of the performance. And that’s where Martin’s set design came to my rescue. The mountainous landscape that the text refers to had broken into the interior long before, the water had been seeping in for some time already, they had laid out a dance floor which began to shine from the lighting and the water. And as I played Lenz in that scene, crouching on the floor, strapped in a straitjacket, soiled, watching the dreck float past in the water and feeling like I was going to throw up at any moment, I saw my face in the reflection of this floor and suddenly I realised. I saw myself, I was eye to eye with the devastation inside me, with my lostness. And then it came out, the line, quite simply – as a response to my self. There it was, the naked existence you’re always looking for on stage.
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2014 Staatsoper Stuttgart 2015 La Monnaie Brussels 2017 Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin 2019 Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (Conductor: Ingo Metzmacher) Conductor: Franck Ollu Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Eva Dessecker Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Jakob Lenz by Wolfgang Rihm
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Macbeth by Giuseppe Verdi 2015 Nationale Opera en Ballet Amsterdam
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Conductor: Marc Albrecht Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Eva Dessecker Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
BLUEBEARD`S CASTLE
Bluebeard´s Castle by Béla Bartók Conductor: Kent Nagano Ghost Variations by Robert Schumann Piano: Elisabeth Leonskaja 2015 A Double evening, Vienna Festival
Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Eva Dessecker Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner 215
GHOST VARIATIONS
The Crucible by Arthur Miller 2016 Burgtheater Vienna
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Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Heide Kastler Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter 2017 co-production Salzburg Festival / Akademietheater Vienna Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Jacques Reynaud Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Conductor: Franck Ollu Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Nina von Mechow Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Il prigioniero by Luigi Dallapiccola Das Gehege (The Enclosure) by Wolfgang Rihm 2018 co-production La Monnaie Brussels / Staatsoper Stuttgart
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Das Gehege (The Enclosure) by Wolfgang Rihm
Long Day´s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill 2018 Burgtheater Vienna
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Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Françoise Clavel Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
Confiscated looted art
Conductor: Daniel Barenboim Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Carla Teti Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Médée by Luigi Cherubini 2018 Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin
Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Alan Hranitelj Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Die Hermannsschlacht (The Battle of Hermann) by Heinrich von Kleist 2019 Burgtheater Vienna
Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Françoise Clavel Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Die Ratten (The Rats) by Gerhart Hauptmann 2019 Burgtheater Vienna
The Fiery Angel by Sergei Prokofjew 2021 Theater an der Wien
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Conductor: Constantin Trinks Director: Andrea Breth Costumes: Carla Teti Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
Homeless bodies, homeless sound Barbara Frey
As a director, you might reasonably expect me to “understand” a stage design after two months of rehearsals. I look at it for hours every day, I have people move about in it, speak or sing in it, and at the end, when the rehearsal scenery has disappeared, the original stage has been set up and all the lighting is added, you might think there would be a great moment of realisation – now everything coheres, now everything “fits”, now I know where I am. I find I don’t have this moment in Martin Zehetgruber’s stage worlds. The discovery goes on after the premiere, the uncertainty remains – the productive ignorance, the groping and questioning. This is something that the actors and singers in these worlds describe as well. Zehetgruber’s images might appear monumental at times – but they are actually delicate casings for the soul. They are constructions of the night, with the universe and the distant Milky Way seeping into them. They can also host the day’s work of humanity, but their sunrays are not to be trusted; they seem to issue from a perpetually nocturnal celestial body, just as the day’s work issues more from sleep and dreams rather than any kind of “day-to-day life”. Ever since I was a child I have been utterly fascinated by insects. They always appear at rehearsals, suddenly, out of nowhere, because they frighten me and I don’t understand them. I see their inscrutable, thousandfold forms; they move about the stage alone or in menacing groups, silently or emitting mysterious sounds. Actors and singers respond to my strange visions with surprising calm; they seem to realise that they can also perform as insects, as though there were a certain natural insect component in human beings. The ability to do that without conjuring awkward animal improvisations has to do with Zehetgruber’s spaces. They enable freedom from any conventional form of psychology, from contested interpretations or even moral implications. So you can just be an insect. Or a plant, or a stone. Or an abandoned piece of furniture. Or a star in a vast and mystifying sky. Yet you’re still at home in Zehetgruber’s chambers and halls. You just need to be aware that it is an elusive and uncanny home. You have to realise that, you have to accept it. It’s a home where you never really arrive. You remain a traveller, a wandering creature, one who is at once wide awake and dreaming, who never knows exactly what it means to be human, and where that shades into other forms of existence. So it is a precarious dwelling you are dealing with.
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And what about language? Music? Language has always been important to me. As narrative, as story, as potential for dramaturgical escalation, but also as acoustic and musical material. In the same way, I have always regarded music as language, narration and means of interpreting everything that happens to us, that pains us and that brings us joy. Martin Zehetgruber’s set designs are also a great challenge for me in terms of all acoustic phenomena. They let you talk, speak, converse, ask questions, sing, exchange views, argue.
But the question remains: is there any response? Is there anything echoing off the walls, the floor, the ceilings? Is there anything calling out like an echo from the flies when the sets are open at the top? Do the homeless objects on the stage – household items, stairs, musical instruments, props – respond? No. All that is sound remains as homeless as all that is body. And yet: there is a home in the homelessness. An arrival where there is no arrival. It has to do with radical attention. If I look carefully, if I listen carefully, if I have the patience, if I am forbearing and free – then I can hear signals. They may come from far away, like snail trails from an empty room, like strange imprints in a mysterious sediment, like sounds from a nocturnal forest that may even be close at hand. For me, the homeless home of Martin Zehetgruber’s sets offers confirmation that I can find comfort in my own homelessness. Homelessness remains, but so does movement. Searching. Researching. Stefanie Wagner has been Martin Zehetgruber’s permanent working partner for years. Nothing happens without her. She is present for all important rehearsal processes, at all discussions, in every problem area and in every proposed solution. She understands drama and opera, her alertness and involvement are absolutely essential for me, a director who is constantly questioning – and doubting. Her presence, her clarity, her humour are of decisive significance for every course of action. You can discuss everything – absolutely everything – with her. And you should! I know that she is in possession of everything that ultimately proves crucial in complicated artistic processes: the vision, the ability to combine and coordinate, the calm when everything is going crazy, the precision when things get vague – and that crucial dash of lightness when everything is getting heavy. Martin Zehetgruber and Stefanie Wagner are what you call a good team, a balanced working partnership. How exactly they think up and feel their designs, fantasies and visions – that’s their secret. Which is nice. And encouraging. Performing arts are community arts. You can’t do anything completely on your own. You have to come together. Again and again. Tirelessly. And you cannot, should not make “public” the secret means of common creativity, in all their luminosity and all their obscurity. They’re not meant for that. They should be allowed to retain their mystery. As a director, I can gain something from this kind of mystery. I can learn from it. Together we can endure homelessness.
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Director: Barbara Frey Costumes: Esther Geremus Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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Automatenbüfett (Automat) by Anna Gmeyner 2020 Akademietheater Vienna
Maschinenhalle Zweckel in Gladbeck
The Fall of the House of Usher Project with texts by Edgar Allan Poe 2021 co-production Ruhrtriennale (Maschinenhalle Zweckel in Gladbeck) / Burgtheater Vienna
Burgtheater Vienna
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Director: Barbara Frey Costumes: Esther Geremus Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
Director: Martin Kušej Costumes: Werner Fritz Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
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No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre 2022 Burgtheater Vienna
Das weite Land (The Vast Domain) by Arthur Schnitzler 2022 co-production Ruhrtriennale (Jahrhunderthalle Bochum)/ Akademietheater Vienna
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Director: Barbara Frey Costumes: Esther Geremus Stage design collaboration: Stefanie Wagner
The Ludwigsburg Stage Tower A conversation with Elisabeth Schweeger
At a time when theatres were closing throughout Germany, the state of BadenWürttemberg succeeded in opening a theatre academy in Ludwigsburg complete with a new theatre building – designed by Martin Zehetgruber. A campus gradually emerged in its vicinity and now – along with the Film Academy that was already on the site, the Animation Institute and the Franco-German film studio – it also hosts three degree courses for the performing arts: acting, direction and dramaturgy. When you took over direction of the Academy in 2014, the institution had been running for seven years and had already experienced a change in management. Under your direction it developed into an outstanding place of training for interdisciplinary theatrical work. Can you describe the role that the building designed by Martin Zehetgruber assumed in this process? It is indeed unusual for a state, in this case Baden-Württemberg, to create a new theatre building. You can attribute it to the innovative character of this higher education project, which also received political support. They recognised that the Film Academy needed a complement, after all film involves performance as well. So they wanted to bring film and theatrical arts together in one place and enter into close cooperations, including a cooperation with the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, which hosts the set and costume design degree courses, where Martin Zehetgruber was appointed Professor. Martin’s stage tower opened in 2008, and with it he created something that astonished me when I first took on this role, and made me realise the possibilities he had thought through. He conceived a building that creates a dialogue with the exterior. So in the tower you have a traditional theatre space with a proscenium arch, where the audience is on one side and the stage on the other, but you can also completely open the space on three sides with large roller doors to reveal the outside world. This brings the city into the theatre and, conversely, the theatre into the city. This idea of opening up is vital for a training centre that is dedicated to the theatrical. We have a duty to reflect and explore where the theatrical arts are headed. Our traditional understanding, which is still rooted in the 19th century, was shaken up some time ago. The circumstances of society have changed and are changing every day, so theatres need to respond to them. You can see this both in the themes that are addressed and in how literature is dealt with in the performative context today. The performing arts are becoming increasingly transdisciplinary. They mix up numerous expressive forms of artistic creativity, and that’s something Zehetgruber’s basic space invites you to do in many different ways.
Yes, the whole place is designed to inspire dialogue with the city; through the permeability of interior and exterior, through the option of addressing the square from above. In his conception, Martin had already thought of something that has proven to be absolutely vital: the option of leaving the elevated, bourgeois site of the theatre behind and examining the relationship between
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Both the inside and the outside of the stage tower can be used for performance. Galleries run around the facade, even the roof can be used as a stage.
performance and audience, re-dimensioning it to allow new forms of performing arts. The space for fantasy has expanded. He has managed to do this without completely abandoning the traditional form of relationship between stage and audience. That is definitely still there. But he has created the foundation for rubbing against it – recognising the traditional to create the new. His theatre building, or his conception of it, offered a variety of design options. Have the options provided by his design materialised in practice? The place really is used in all its diversity. We regularly think about the audience situation; the audience’s view changes, they sit, they stand, they walk around. The seats can easily be removed, you can perform in every direction, although the built-in proscenium arch remains visible and cannot be removed from view. The lower stage has already been transformed into a labyrinth and the outer galleries have been used numerous times. And because we truly believe in theatre that absorbs societal processes, we regularly include visual artists and curators in the curriculum who then develop their own, different approach to this architecture and talk to the students about other ways of presenting art, develop designs for installations and examine how spatial conditions can be transformed into narratives. That sounds harmonious. In reality, variable usage of stage spaces often fails due to effort, resources and safety concerns. We have around eighty events a year, and every student of direction completes around eight to ten practical projects over the course of their studies. Not all of them are realised on this stage – some of them seek out other places, they seek challenges in public space. But I would say that the students have worked with Martin’s stage tower in numerous ways. Of course, with its packed programme the Academy has processes that are something like what you’d find in a small theatre operation, which is good preparation for future work in professional life, but it should still be seen as a training space, as a place for experimentation, a protected field for all possibilities, including those that extend beyond the reality of institutional theatre. So not everything has to be handled as strictly as it is in a theatre, but at the end of the day our students have to deal with the factuality and issues of technology, and they are definitely well trained when they are released into the theatre world. Does the university have its own stage technology? Are there workshops? What kind of sets do you create? We have our own technical team and production management who help with set rehearsals and planning and with assembly and dismantling.
We have set up workshops so that the students from Martin’s class can work on site. They get an introduction to equipment and materials and get to build there themselves. This gives the students greater opportunities for independent development. The sets that we create – that’s not easy to answer. It always depends on the team of direction, dramaturgy and set design on hand at the time. These are collective processes and sometimes the directing students are looking for a more performative approach than the set design students. As we have observed, some of them really respect being able to work in a space that offers so many technical opportunities. Not everyone begins by questioning it or wondering how they can push through it; first they want to understand it and use it for themselves. But there were always some highly maverick spirits who picked up the ball. Certainly, one challenge with set designs is the budget available for the individual productions. While it is still generous compared to other educational institutions, the luxury of the 1990s and 00s is gone. The thinking has changed a lot since then. As it should. What developments do you foresee for the Ludwigsburg Academy?
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I see the Academy as a space for opportunity, and Martin’s theatre building is a potent sparring partner for exploring forms of play and storytelling. The campus is growing together. Filmic arts and performing arts now use all the spaces and possibilities, including each other’s, and often together. The pandemic also forced us to develop hybrid forms, to discover virtual spaces as spaces for art and performance, to search for new narratives, which we have recently come together to develop. This utopia of a campus for interdisciplinary performing arts – from the analogue to the digital – has taken shape, developed its unique characteristics, refined its profile and positioned itself internationally. Both academies benefit from each other, expand the space for art and complement each other. This closer cooperation has led to something new. We are also planning new degree courses to expand practice-oriented research: an international Master’s in Directing and a bilingual Master’s in Acting, which offer the chance to prepare for the international market and create more space for the transdisciplinary study of new formats. This is something we need if the Academy for the Performing Arts is to keep its finger on the pulse and take the lead in shaping the performing arts of tomorrow. And we can expand the study programme because the Academy for Performing Arts has the infrastructure to do so – not least because of the stage tower with all its possibilities, which invites you to use every one of its crevices, heights and apertures, to get it swinging, ringing and moving, to work with contingencies, to expand it, compress it or turn it inside out, to externalise it and develop a different idea of theatre.
2000 First draft 1 2 - 4
Safety curtain Roller doors
Academy of Performing Arts Baden-Württemberg 2008 opening
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View of the theatre tower and the outdoor performance area / on the left, the adjoining rehearsal rooms / behind them classrooms and workshops, foyer / in front and set lower down, the green space of the campus of the Academy of Performing Arts and the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg
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VIEW EXTERIOR 1 tower
2 circumferential galleries (inside and outside)
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3 closed roller doors 4 auditorium
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INTERIOR PERFORMANCE OPTIONS also usable as a classic proscenium stage
1 movable proscenium arch 2 double turntable
3 movable orchestra pit 4 auditorium seating rows tiered and movable
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EXTERIOR PERFORMANCE OPTIONS
for audience or performers when roller doors are open
INTERIOR PERFORMANCE OPTIONS for audience or performers
1 with roller doors open
2 levelled floor in the “auditorium“
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Résumé Works
Awards
Résumé 1961 Birth in Styria, Austria
1988 Civilian service 1989 Founding of the production cooperative My friend Martin with Martin Kušej 1990 Presentation of the mobile audience container from “Tode” at Technova International in Graz 1993 Permanent engagement at Schauspiel Stuttgart until 2001 1996 Marriage to Susanne Weckerle, birth of son Jasper, move to Germany 1999 Birth of daughter Celia
Donawitz steelworks, railway station 1979 Death of his father
2001 Appointment to professorship of the set design department of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart Design of the “Stage Tower” and conceptual guidance in the planning phase of the Academy of Performing Arts Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg up to its foundation 2002 Death of his brother 2004 Beginning of collaboration with Stefanie Wagner 2013 Divorce 2015 Marriage to Stefanie Wagner 2017 Death of his mother
1981 - 1986 Set design studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, graduation with distinction. Throughout this time, assistance on a number of Styrian state exhibitions and at the steirischer herbst festival
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Donawitz steelworks, canteen
Works 1983 “Act without Words” by Samuel Beckett in the former tavern Der Wilde Mann, Graz, Director: Caroline Weber “Yes, Perhaps” by Marguerite Duras, Forum Stadtpark, Graz, Director: Caroline Weber
1990 “Glaube Liebe Hoffnung” (“Faith, Hope, and Charity”) by Ödön von Horváth, Slovenian National Theatre Ljubljana, Director: Martin Kušej “Szenen aus dem Bleistiftgebiet” (“Scenes from the Pencil Zone”) by Robert Walser, independent production, Biel and Basel, Director: Caroline Weber “The Trio in E Minor” by Eric Rohmer, Theater Winkelwiese Zurich, Director: Caroline Weber “Wie es ist” (“How It is”), montage of “Sturmpatrull” (“Storm Patrol”) by Arnolt Bronnen and “Die Humanisten” (“The Humanists”) by Ernst Jandl, klagenfurter ensemble, Director: Martin Kušej “Philoktet” (“Philoctetes”) by Heiner Müller, Jura Soyfer Theater Vienna, Director: Martin Kušej “Tode” (“Deaths”) by My friend Martin, Messeparkplatz Graz, Director: Martin Kušej “Mobiler Himmel” (“Mobile Heaven”) by My friend Martin, steirischer herbst Graz, Director: Martin Kušej
Director Caroline Weber
Martin Zehetgruber
1986 “The Curious Ones” by Carlo Manzoni and “Boden 411” (“Ground 411”) by Lutz Rathenow, independent production, Zurich, Director: Caroline Weber
1991 “Pohujšanje” by Ivan Cankar, Slovensko Mladinsko Gledališče Ljubljana, Director: Martin Kušej – rehearsals cancelled due to outbreak of civil war in Yugoslavia “Tage des Königs” (“Days of the King”) by Peter Rosei, Schauspielhaus Graz, Director: Martin Kušej
1987 “Judith” by Kurt Franz, klagenfurter ensemble, Director: Martin Kušej “Es” (“It”) by Karl Schönherr, Schauspielhaus Graz, Director: Martin Kušej “Happy Baby, wir spielen nur es tut nicht weh” (“Happy Baby, We’re Just Playing It Doesn’t Hurt”) by Matjaž Grilj, steirischer herbst Graz, Director: Edward Müller 1988 “Der Untergang der Titanic” (“The Sinking of the Titanic”) by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Schauspielhaus Graz, Director: Martin Kušej 1989 “Schneewittchen” (“Snow White”) by Robert Walser, independent production, Schlachthof Graz, Director: Caroline Weber Director Martin Kušej
1992 “Der Traum ein Leben” (“A Dream is Life”) by Franz Grillparzer, Schauspielhaus Graz, Director: Martin Kušej
“Straßenecke. Ein Ort. Eine Handlung” (“Street Corner. A Location. An Action”) by Hans Henny Jahnn, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Director: Martin Kušej
“Romeo and Juliet” by Sergei Prokofiev, Opernhaus Graz, Director: Heinz Spoerli “Mesalliance/aber wir ficken uns prächtig” (“Mésalliance/but we fuck brilliantly”) by Werner Schwab, steirischer herbst Graz, Director: Marc Günther “Franz Falsch F Falsch Dein Falsch Nichts Mehr Stille Tiefer Wald” (“Franz Wrong, F Wrong, Yours Wrong Nothing More, Calm, Deep Forest”) by My friend Martin, Mittelfest Cividale, Italy, Director: Martin Kušej “Irrlichter - Schrittmacher” (“Will o’ the Wisps - Pacemakers”) by Thomas Strittmatter, Residenztheater Munich (Marstall), Director: Martin Kušej 1993 “Kabale und Liebe” (“Intrigue and Love”) by Friedrich Schiller, co-production of Stadttheater Klagenfurt/Schauspiel Stuttgart, Director: Martin Kušej “Herzog Theodor von Gothland” (“Duke Theodor von Gothland”) by Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Director: Martin Kušej 1994 “Kill Pig Devil Passion Finish God” by Martin Kušej, coproduction of Schauspielhaus Graz/Ballett Graz/Vienna Festival/ Tanz 94, Director: Martin Kušej “Prinz Friedrich von Homburg” (“The Prince of Homburg”) by Heinrich von Kleist, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Director: Martin Kušej
Actor Andreas Schlager in “Straßenecke“ by Hans Henny Jahnn 1995 “Die Unbekannte aus der Seine” (“The Unknown Woman from the Seine”) by Ödön von Horváth, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Director: Martin Kušej “Clavigo” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Director: Martin Kušej “Pension Schöller” by Carl Lauf and Wilhelm Jacoby, Schauspielhaus Graz, Director: Marc Günther “Maria Magdalena” by Friedrich Hebbel, Thalia Theater Hamburg, Director: Amélie Niermeyer 1996 “King Arthur” by Henry Purcell and John Dryden, co-production of Staatsoper Stuttgart/Schauspiel Stuttgart/Stuttgarter Ballett/Conductor: Alan Hacker, Director: Martin Kušej “Richard III” by William Shakespeare, Volksbühne am RosaLuxemburg-Platz Berlin, Director: Martin Kušej “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by William Shakespeare, Schauspielhaus Graz, Director: Marc Günther
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“Die Jungfrau von Orleans” (“The Maid of Orleans”) by Friedrich Schiller, Nationaltheater Mannheim, Director: Bruno Klimek
Martin Zehetgruber “Z 1994“, figure by stage designer Bettina Meyer
1997 “Oedipus” by Sophocles, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Director: Martin Kušej
“Salome” by Richard Strauss, Opernhaus Zürich, Conductor: Valery Gergiev, Teatro Filharmonico Verona, Conductor: Christian Arming, Director: Martin Kušej
“Die Geier-Wally” (“The Vulture Maiden”) by Wilhelmine von Hillern, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Director: Martin Kušej
2001 “Glaube und Heimat” (“Faith and Homeland”) by Karl Schönherr, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Martin Kušej
1998 “Fidelio” by Ludwig van Beethoven, Staatsoper Stuttgart, Conductor: Michael Gielen, Director: Martin Kušej “Alberta und Alice” (“Alberta and Alice”) by Italo Svevo, Schauspielhaus Graz, Director: Marc Günther “Al gran sole carico d’amore” by Luigi Nono, Staatsoper Stuttgart, Conductor: Lothar Zagrosek, Director: Martin Kušej “Brecht.”, choreographic theatre, Nationaltheater Mannheim, Director: Johann Kresnik 1999 “Salome” by Richard Strauss, Oper Graz, Conductor: Wolfgang Bozic, Director: Martin Kušej
2002 “Die Gezeichneten” (“The Branded”) by Franz Schreker, Conductor: Lothar Zagrosek, Staatsoper Stuttgart, Director: Martin Kušej “Glaube Liebe Hoffnung” (“Faith, Hope, and Charity”) by Ödön von Horváth, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Martin Kušej “Don Giovanni” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Salzburg Festival, Conductor: Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Director: Martin Kušej “Letzter Aufruf” (“Last Call”) by Albert Ostermaier, Burgtheater Vienna (Arsenal), Director: Andrea Breth
“Wiener Blut” (“Vienna Blood”) choreographic theatre, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Johann Kresnik “Cleansed” by Sarah Kane, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Director: Martin Kušej “Weh dem, der lügt!” (“Woe to Him Who Lies”) by Franz Grillparzer, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Martin Kušej 2000 “Aller Seelen” (“All Souls”) after texts by Werner Fritsch, choreographic theatre, Thalia Theater Hamburg, Director: Johann Kresnik “The Ghost Sonata” by August Strindberg, Thalia Theater Hamburg, Director: Martin Kušej “Schnitzlers Brain”, after texts by Arthur Schnitzler, Schauspielhaus Graz, a joint project with the directors Martin Kušej, Johann Kresnik, Christoph Schlingensief, Stephan Kimmig, Thomas Bischoff and Marc Günther “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare, co-production Salzburg Festival, Schauspiel Stuttgart, Director: Martin Kušej
Author Albert Ostermaier and Martin Zehetgruber
2003 “Peer Gynt” after Henrik Ibsen, choreographic theatre, coproduction Salzburg Festival/Schauspiel Hannover, Director: Johann Kresnik “Una cosa rara” by Vicente Martín y Soler, Staatsoper Stuttgart, Conductor: Enrique Mazzola, Director: Jossi Wieler 2004 “Hannelore Kohl”, Opernhaus Bonn, choreographic theatre by Johann Kresnik
Choreographer Johann Kresnik and Martin Zehetgruber “Don Carlos” by Friedrich Schiller, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Andrea Breth 2005 “Nach den Klippen” (“After the Cliffs”) by Albert Ostermaier, Akademietheater Vienna, Director: Andrea Breth “Otello” by Giuseppe Verdi, Staatsoper Stuttgart, Conductor: Nicola Luisotti, Director: Martin Kušej
Director Martin Kušej and Martin Zehetgruber, invitation from the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow
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“König Ottokars Glück und Ende” (“The Rise and Fall of King Ottokar”) by Franz Grillparzer, co-production Salzburg Festival/Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Martin Kušej
2006 “Höllenangst” (“Hellish Fear”) by Johann Nestroy, co-production Salzburg Festival/Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Martin Kušej
“Der Weibsteufel” (“The She-Devil”) by Karl Schönherr, Akademietheater Vienna, Director: Martin Kušej
“Glaube Liebe Hoffnung” (“Faith, Hope, and Charity”) by Ödön von Horváth, Director: Stephan Kimmig “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Dmitri Shostakovich, Nationale Opera en Ballet Amsterdam, Conductor: Mariss Jansons, Director: Martin Kušej 2007 “Woyzeck” by Georg Büchner, Residenztheater Munich, Director: Martin Kušej “Die Gezeichneten” by Franz Schreker, Nationale Opera en Ballet Amsterdam, Conductor: Ingo Metzmacher, Director: Martin Kušej “Eugene Onegin” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Salzburg Festival, Conductor: Daniel Barenboim, Director: Andrea Breth 2008 “The Wars of the Roses” by William Shakespeare, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Stephan Kimmig
Composer Bert Wrede and costume designer Heide Kastler “Macbeth” by Giuseppe Verdi, Bayerische Staatsoper Munich, Conductor: Nicola Luisotti, Director: Martin Kušej “Macbeth“ by William Shakespeare, Akademietheater Vienna, Director: Stephan Kimmig 2009 “The Master Builder” by Henrik Ibsen, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Director: Martin Kušej “Salome” by Richard Strauss, Opera Barcelona, Conductor: Michael Boder, Director: Guy Joosten “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Dmitri Shostakovich, Opéra Bastille Paris, Conductor: Hartmut Haenchen, Director: Martin Kušej
Dramaturge Sebastian Huber and director Stephan Kimmig
2010 “Lulu” by Frank Wedekind, Schauspiel Frankfurt, Director: Stephan Kimmig
2012 “Prinz Friedrich von Homburg” by Heinrich von Kleist, Salzburg Festival/Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Andrea Breth
“Rusalka” by Antonín Dvořák, Bayerische Staatsoper Munich, Conductor: Tomáš Hanus, Director: Martin Kušej
“La Traviata” by Giuseppe Verdi, La Monnaie Brussels, Conductor: Adam Fischer, Director: Andrea Breth
“Der fliegende Holländer” (“The Flying Dutchman”) by Richard Wagner, Nationale Opera en Ballet Amsterdam, Conductor: Hartmut Haenchen, Director: Martin Kušej
“Salome” by Richard Strauss, La Monnaie, Brussels, Conductor: Carlo Rizzi, Director: Guy Joosten 2013 “Hamlet“ by William Shakespeare, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Andrea Breth “The Gambler” by Sergei Prokofiev, Nationale Opera en Ballet Amsterdam, Conductor: Marc Albrecht, Director: Andrea Breth 2014 “Jakob Lenz” by Wolfgang Rihm, Staatsoper Stuttgart, Conductor: Franck Ollu, Director: Andrea Breth 2015 “Macbeth” by Giuseppe Verdi, Nationale Opera en Ballet Amsterdam, Conductor: Marc Albrecht, Director: Andrea Breth “Bluebeard’s Castle” by Béla Bartók and “Ghost Variations” by Robert Schumann, Vienna Festival, Conductor: Kent Nagano, Director: Andrea Breth “Jakob Lenz” by Wolfgang Rihm, La Monnaie Brussels, Conductor: Franck Ollu, Director: Andrea Breth
Light designer Reinhard Traub, Stefanie Wagner and director Martin Kušej watch firefighters extinguishing the fire in their accommodation in Amsterdam 2011 “Wozzeck” by Alban Berg, Staatsoper in the Schiller Theater Berlin, Conductor: Daniel Barenboim, Director: Andrea Breth “Das weite Land” (“The Vast Domain”) by Arthur Schnitzler, Residenztheater Munich, Director: Martin Kušej “Zwischenfälle” (“Incidents”) by Georges Courteline, Pierre Henri Cami and Daniil Charms, Akademietheater Vienna, Director: Andrea Breth
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“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Dmitri Shostakovich, Opéra Bastille Paris, Conductor: Hartmut Haenchen, Director: Martin Kušej
2016 “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Martin Kušej
Opening night party for “The Crucible” (clockwise): Martin Zehetgruber, his children Celia and Jasper, Stefanie Wagner, costume designer Heide Kastler
2018 “Il prigioniero” by Luigi Dallapiccola and “Das Gehege” (“The Enclosure”) by Wolfgang Rihm, co-production La Monnaie Brussels/ Staatsoper Stuttgart, Conductor: Franck Ollu, Director: Andrea Breth
Opera singer Georg Nigl “Médée” by Luigi Cherubini, Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin, Conductor: Daniel Barenboim, Director: Andrea Breth
“This Story of Yours” by John Hopkins, Akademietheater Vienna, Director: Andrea Breth “Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige” (“The Ignorant and the Insane”) by Thomas Bernhard, Salzburg Festival, Director: Gerd Heinz “Manon Lescaut” by Giacomo Puccini, Nationale Opera en Ballet Amsterdam, Conductor: Alexander Joel, Director: Andrea Breth 2017 “Jakob Lenz” by Wolfgang Rihm, Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin, Conductor: Franck Ollu, Director: Andrea Breth “The Birthday Party” by Harold Pinter, co-production Salzburg Festival/Akademietheater Vienna, Director: Andrea Breth “Ein europäisches Abendmahl” (“A European Supper”) by Nino Haratischwili, Elfriede Jelinek, Terézia Mora and Sofi Oksanen, Akademietheater Vienna, Director: Barbara Frey “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” by Dmitri Shostakovich, Teatro di San Carlo Naples, Conductor: Juraj Valčuha, Director: Martin Kušej
Lighting designer Alexander Koppelmann and Stefanie Wagner
“Long Day’s Journey into Night” by Eugene O’Neill, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Andrea Breth 2019 “The Dead” after texts by James Joyce, Schauspielhaus Zürich, Director: Barbara Frey
2020 “Cavalleria rusticana” by Pietro Mascagni and “Luci mie traditrici” by Salvatore Sciarrino, Staatsoper Stuttgart, Conductor: Cornelius Meister, Director: Barbara Frey “Automatenbüfett” (“Automat”) by Anna Gmeyner, Akademietheater Vienna, Director: Barbara Frey 2021 “The Fiery Angel” by Sergei Prokofiev, Theater an der Wien Vienna, Conductor: Constantin Trinks, Director: Andrea Breth “The Fall of the House of Usher”, project with texts by Edgar Allan Poe, co-production Ruhrtriennale (Maschinenhalle Zweckel in Gladbeck)/ Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Barbara Frey
Director Barbara Frey “Die Ratten” (“The Rats”) by Gerhart Hauptmann, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Andrea Breth “Jakob Lenz” by Wolfgang Rihm, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Conductor: Ingo Metzmacher, Director: Andrea Breth “Die Hermannsschlacht” (“The Battle of Hermann”) by Heinrich von Kleist, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Martin Kušej
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Foreground left: costume designer Esther Geremus, foreground right: dramaturge Andreas Karlaganis
Martin Zehetgruber and the former Head Stage Manager of the Burgtheater Klaus von Schwerin
2022 “No Exit” by Jean-Paul Sartre, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Martin Kušej
Martin Zehetgruber and costume designer Werner Fritz “Das weite Land” by Arthur Schnitzler, co-production Ruhrtriennale (Jahrhunderthalle Bochum)/Akademietheater Vienna, Director: Barbara Frey
Employees of the Burgtheater Top left: Peter Wiesinger (Group Master), Friedrich Rom (Head of Lighting department and lighting designer), Thomas Bautenbacher (Technical Director), bottom left: Johann Krainz (Stage Inspector) and Ernst Meissl (Technical Manager) after the presentation of the Heinz Filar Ring to Johann Krainz
Martin Zehetgruber 2022
Awards 1986 Honorary Prize for Outstanding Artistic Achievement of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research for the final year project “Woyzeck” by Georg Büchner 1994
Josef Kainz Medal Promotional Award for “Kill Pig Devil Passion Finish God” 1998 “Set Designer of the Year” in the critics’ survey of the journal Theater heute for “Die Geier-Wally” (“The Vulture Maiden”) by Wilhelmine von Hillern 2000 Set Designer of the Year in the critics’ survey of the journal Theater heute for “The Ghost Sonata” by August Strindberg Nomination for the NESTROY Theatre Prize in the “Best Design” category for “Weh dem, der lügt” (“Woe to Him Who Lies”) by Franz Grillparzer 2001 NESTROY Theatre Prize in the “Best Design” category for “Glaube und Heimat” (“Faith and Homeland”) by Karl Schönherr 2002 NESTROY Theatre Prize in the “Best Design” category for “Letzter Aufruf” (“Last Call”) by Albert Ostermaier 2004 NESTROY Theatre Prize in the “Best Design” category for “Don Carlos” by Friedrich Schiller 2006 NESTROY Theatre Prize in the “Best Design” category for “Höllenangst” (“Hellish Fear”) by Johann Nestroy
2020 Prix du Syndicat professionnel de la Critique Théâtre, Musique et Danse for the “Best European Opera Production” at the Festival d’Aix en Provence for “Jakob Lenz” by Wolfgang Rihm 2021 Czech Crystal Prize for “The Fiery Angel” by Sergei Prokofiev at the 58th International TV Festival GOLDEN PRAGUE 2021 “The Fiery Angel” nomination at the VENICE TV Awards 2021 (VTVA) in the “Performing Arts” category Nomination for the NESTROY Theatre Prize in the “Best Design” category for “Automatenbüfett” (“Automat”) by Anna Gmeyner 2022 Austrian Musical Theatre Prize in the “Best Overall Opera Production” category for “The Fiery Angel” by Sergei Prokofiev Invitations to the Berliner Theatertreffen 2001 “Glaube und Heimat” by Karl Schönherr, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Martin Kušej 2004 “Don Carlos” by Friedrich Schiller, Burgtheater Vienna, Director: Andrea Breth 2009 “Der Weibsteufel” by Karl Schönherr, Akademietheater Vienna, Director: Martin 2020 “Automatenbüfett” by Anna Gmeyner, Akademietheater Vienna, Director: Barbara Frey
2009 NESTROY Theatre Prize in the “Best Design” category for “Der Weibsteufel” (“The She-Devil”) by Karl Schönherr 2010 Hamburg Theatre Prize – Rolf Mares for “The Master Builder” by Henrik Ibsen
2015 “Production of the Year” in the critics’ survey of the journal Opernwelt for “Jakob Lenz” by Wolfgang Rihm
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2011 “Set Designer of the Year” in the critics’ survey of the journal Opernwelt for “Wozzeck” by Alban Berg and “Rusalka” by Antonín Dvorák
TROFAIACH SPAGETTI Serves four Sauce 30 g flour 60 g butter 800 g tomato passata 100 g tomato paste lemon juice salt pepper Pasta 500 g spaghetti 2 tablespoons dried marjoram salt 1 tablespoons olive oil Meat 500g minced beef 1 large onion 2 tablespoons olive oil dried marjoram salt pepper grated parmesan
Melt 40g butter in a saucepan until it foams, sprinkle with the flour and sauté while stirring constantly until you have a light to medium brown smooth mass with a nutty scent. Stir in the passata and the tomato paste. Bring to boil on a low heat. Dilute with a little pasta water if necessary until the sauce has a smooth consistency. Add salt and pepper to taste, plus a little lemon juice and a pinch of sugar. Before serving stir in the remaining 20g butter. Bring salted water to boil in a saucepan. Add pasta and marjoram and boil until al dente. Meanwhile, finely chop the onions and sauté in a pan until glassy. Add the minced beef, brown, then stir in the marjoram until the meat is crumbly. Add salt and pepper to taste. Drain the pasta and return to the pot with the olive oil then carefully fold in the minced beef and brown on a high heat. Make sure that the pasta and meat don’t burn. To serve, distribute the pasta and the minced beef on one or more plates, add the minced beef still in the pot to the plate(s) and pour over the tomato sauce. Finally, sprinkle with grated parmesan.
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Recipe from Upper Styria Fusion of Italian cuisine of memory and Bohemian cuisine of experience Austria 1960s
Profiles
Barbara Frey Theatre and opera director, artistic director. Between 2009 and 2019 she headed up the Schauspielhaus in Zurich, from 2021 to 2023 she was responsible for the programme of the Ruhrtriennale – Festival of the Arts. Judith Gerstenberg Dramaturge, most recently in a leading position at the Ruhrtriennale from 2021 to 2023. For Verlag Theater der Zeit she has issued the monographs “Ruedi Häusermann – Umwege zum Konzert. Eine Werkschau mit Klangspur” (2015) and “Bettina Meyer – Einszufünfundzwanzig. Bilder Bühnen Räume” (2017). Heide Kastler Costume designer, active internationally as a freelancer. Professor of Costume Design at the Hannover University of Applied Sciences and Arts since 2013. Christoph Klimke Writer and translator. As a dramaturge he has maintained a close artistic partnership with choreographer Johann Kresnik. Alexander Koppelmann Lighting designer. For over 20 years he has worked regularly with director Andrea Breth in the field of theatre and opera.
Nicholas Ofczarek Theatre and film actor. Member of the Burgtheater Vienna ensemble since 1995/96. Andreas Schlager Actor and photographer. Long-term engagements at houses such as the Volkstheater Vienna, Schauspiel Stuttgart and Schauspiel Hannover. Elisabeth Schweeger Literary scholar, cultural manager and artistic director. Between 2014 and 2022 she headed the Academy of Performing Arts Baden-Württemberg. In 2022 she took up the role of Artistic Director of the Bad Ischl/Salzkammergut European Capital of Culture 2024. Klaus von Schwerin Stage manager. In 1999 he left Schaubühne Berlin for the Burgtheater Vienna, where he has been Head Stage Manager since 2020. Stefanie Wagner Set designer. Martin Zehetgruber’s partner in life and work for many years.
Georg Nigl Opera and concert singer, singing teacher. He has appeared at major opera and concert houses throughout Europe. As a soloist he has sung in numerous premieres.
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Martin Kušej Theatre and opera director, artistic director. Between 2011 and 2019 he headed the Residenztheater in Munich before transferring to the Burgtheater Vienna. He is also Professor of Directing at the Max Reinhardt Seminar.
Martin Zehetgruber and Stefanie Wagner / 2017 Naples / in preparation for “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” at the Teatro San Carlo
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Netsuke “Ashinaga and Tenaga” / Ivory / Edo period, c. 1810
Thanks to: the photographers Hans Jörg Michel and Georg Soulek
ADK 2022
ADK 2027
ADK 2032
Image credits With the exception of the images credited below, all photos, drawings and video stills are taken from Martin Zehetgruber’s image archive. We have made every effort to obtain reproduction rights. Since the owner of the rights could not be identified or contacted in some cases, legal claims will be settled once they are asserted. Photos Thomas Aurin p. 77 (u.r.); Hermann and Clärchen Baus p. 90 – 93; Klaus Fröhlich p. 74 f., p. 82 f.; Matthias Horn p. 70 f.; Wilfried Hösl p. 158 – 163, p. 174 (l.l.), p. 176 – 177 (l.l., m., l.r.); Hans Jörg Michel p. 72 f., p. 84 – 89, p. 94 – 97, p. 104 – 107, p. 120 f., p. 126 f., p. 128 – 129 (u.r., l.r.), p. 130 – 131 (u.r.), p. 132 – 133 (u.r.), p. 134 – 135 (u.r.), p. 136 – 137, p. 138 – 139 (u.l., u.r.), p. 140 – 141 (u.l., l.l., l.r.), p. 142 f., 146 – 149, p. 257 (u.r.); A. T. Schaefer p. 172 (l.r.); Burgtheater/ Georg Soulek p. 144 f., p. 164 – 165 (l.r.), p. 166 f., p. 170 f., p. 216 f.; Bernd Uhlig p. 204 (l.r.), p. 206 (u.l., l.l.), p. 208 (u.l., m.l, l.l.), p. 210 (u.l., l.l.), p. 212 – 213 (u.), p. 226 – 227 (l.), p. 232 – 233 (l.), p. 262 (u.r.); Stuttgart Department of Public Order, Penalty Office p. 6 f. Flip book 1st sequence: Zehetgruber archive/2nd sequence: Larry Semon “The Stage Hand” (1920)/3rd sequence: Zehetgruber archive/4th sequence: Atomic bomb tests, Nevada (1951–1958 NNSS)/5th sequence: Zehetgruber archive/6th sequence: Zehetgruber archive/7th sequence: Buster Keaton, “Steamboat Bill” (1928)/8th sequence: Zehetgruber archive/9th sequence: Felix E. Feist, “Deluge – Destruction of New York” (1933)/10th and 11th sequence: Buster Keaton, “Steamboat Bill” (1928)/final sequence: dancing man, Sydney, Victory Day 1945
Credits ALLES KATASTROPHE! Stages Martin Zehetgruber Edited by Judith Gerstenberg © 2023 by Theater der Zeit Images and illustrations are protected by copyright. Any use not expressly permitted under the German Copyright Act requires the prior permission of the publisher. This applies in particular to reproductions, revisions, translations and microfilm, and feeding into and processing within electronic media. Verlag Theater der Zeit Publishing Director: Harald Müller Winsstraße 72 | 10405 Berlin | Germany www.tdz.de Layout: Stefanie Wagner Editorial: Nicole Gronemeyer Translation: James J. Conway ISBN 978-3-95749-471-9 (Paperback) ISBN 978-3-95749-487-0 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-95749-491-7 (english ePDF)
Images that leave an after-impression on the retina. Memories. No depictions. No templates. No real spaces. Remnants of impressions deposited in the memory – in his, in society’s. Situations, images, texts, encounters comprehended emotively. They pile up, forming a slag heap in his mind. That these images are informed by personal experience is clear. The landscapes that he mounts on stage are familiar to him, so too the malign sprites that inhabit them. He puts himself into all his sets. And with each of his spaces he demands dialogue, forces an encounter with them. For 40 years, the multiple award-winning sets by Austria’s Martin Zehetgruber have been a major presence in the European theatre scene. This book traces his career and brings together impressions by artistic collaborators in a range of disciplines. With contributions from Barbara Frey, Judith Gerstenberg, Heide Kastler, Christoph Klimke, Alexander Koppelmann, Martin Kušej, Georg Nigl, Nicholas Ofczarek, Andreas Schlager, Elisabeth Schweeger and Klaus von Schwerin