Kluge evening in the Kammerspiele: how to repair a revue
Munich – Alexander Kluge is hard to believe: The 90-year-old, who lives in Schwabing, is a trained lawyer, is one of the most important directors of New German Film, is an influential philosopher and, together with Oskar Negt, continued the Frankfurt School or infected it, albeit largely without consequences, as a writer and producer of private television with intellect when it was still in its infancy.
“The thought of repair and the possibility of saving things occupies us”
With shows like “News & Stories” he whets the appetite for intellectual adventures. Kluge invented film titles like “In danger and dire need, the middle way brings death” or “Artists in the circus dome: at a loss”. This film from 1968 forms the dramatic framework for “Who always threatens dies singing”, which premieres this Saturday in the Schauspielhaus.
AZ: Mr. Gockel, you have been developing the piece from Alexander Kluge’s texts for a few months. Is there room for the current event in Eastern Europe?
JAN-CHRISTOPH GOCKEL: Must. As an artist you can’t relate to that, especially if you want to do political theatre. The question is what role art has in this flood of images, information and emotions. Of course it was all planned well in advance, but the subtitle is Repairing a Revue, and that thought of repair and the ability to salvage and restore things has been on our minds the whole time. Now, with the Russian war of aggression against the Ukraine, this has received a new boost and we have faced it afresh. But the bomb disposal devices from the film “The Patriot” came before that. And we had a bomb on stage the whole time and were wondering if it was possible to defuse it before it hit.
“How are you supposed to adapt a Kluge film?”
The title “Whoever weighs, dies singing” reads very intelligently. Where did you get that phrase from?
There is a story about an Antoine Billot. This is a man who survives whatever disasters come his way. That’s such a smart thing. The first disaster is a train wreck and everyone is dead but Billot survived. His story of survival quickly stretches across a century. The story is called “Whoever fights dies singing”. We were still discussing whether the evening should be called “Artists in the circus dome: at a loss” because the film is our template, but it’s not a film adaptation. How are you supposed to adapt a Kluge film? But the characters and the circus in general play a major role.
In what way?
It’s a circus show. We have a lot of circus elements that evening: tightrope walkers, fire-eaters, animals, because the puppet maker Michael Pietsch built an elephant, and the “repair” is quickly a reform, which is also the overarching theme of the film. Leni Peickert, who inherits the circus from her father, wants to set up a reform circus. You want a modern circus because she loves circus. A scientific circus that doesn’t train the animals, but shows them authentically. For Leni Peickert it will be a story of failure. She is “perplexed” – but perplexed is not a negative term, rather this perplexity initiates search movements.
Oppose the trend towards the doomsday narrative with another possibility
And what had to be “fixed”?
I originally wanted to do something dystopian like “Your Palaces Are Empty” because these apocalyptic worlds really fascinate me. But long before the war in Ukraine, I wanted to try to counteract the doomsday trend with another possibility. Kluge has stories about happy endings that are extremely unlikely. With “Othello”, for example, it could be that in act five Emilia knocks on the door so hard that Othello lets go of Desdemona, goes to the door, asks Emilia what she wants and thereby loses the energy to kill – a “disarmament of the fifth act”.
Kluge loves the circus, is a profound opera connoisseur, has helped write cinema history, but with the spoken word on the foreign stage he is always good. How do you make Kluge theater compatible?
There are many different approaches to how Kluge’s texts come to life on stage – radio play, live video, interviews. I think it’s important that you don’t have to know Kluge at all to be able to take part in the theater evening. It’s also a circus show with everything happening behind the scenes as well.
Gockel on Kluge: “A collaborative artist and at the same time his own cosmos”
How did you and Alexander Kluge get together?
I’ve been reading his stories for years because I love that way of thinking. Some of his thoughts and texts have already made it into evenings of mine. He finds connections, “mole tunnels”, between very different cosms. Totally fantastic! When we first met him, he said to me: “My lyrics aren’t dramatic. And in the film I can make a ceiling collapse. How do you plan to do that?” Luckily I had one of Michael Pietsch’s dolls with me, put it on the table and covered it with pieces of paper and books. Kluge looked at the doll’s body and said: “You can do that, Mr. Gockel, it works”.
Seems like he’s good to work with.
He is a collaborative artist and at the same time his own cosmos. At 90 he’s still interested in what people of my generation are doing. He speaks of the “lowering of the ego threshold”. It’s not about dissolving into a us, but about representing one’s own position. But his approach is: “We can have different opinions. That’s totally fine”.
chamber playsPremiere on Saturday, 8 p.m., in April again on the 10th and 29th, 8 p.m. Tickets by phone 233 966 00
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) {if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n, arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)}; if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '2523508247947799'); fbq('track', 'PageView');