Performance for an actress, two speakers, a drummer and an everyday expert
With: Rana Farahani, Andreas Lübbers, Dirk Achim Dhonau, Isabelle McEwen, Arne Böge; text and direction: Isabelle McEwen, music: Dirk Achim Dhonau, dramaturgy: Andreas Lübbers, costumes: Annabelle Gotha
Premiere: 01.02.2019 at the Hamburg Sprechwerk
Sara (Rana Farahani) dreams of an art that formulates a truth. An art that tells something about the world we live in. Which opens the eyes to the real circumstances. But can this dream become reality? Hasn't art long since degenerated into a manipulative consumer good within the framework of the capitalist world order?
In her dream, Sara meets people who should know about art, art buyers, art theorists, art makers and art dealers. She encounters the most diverse perspectives on and expectations of art. May she call for resistance? Can she speak the truth? How can art survive without becoming dependent? Doesn't an art that is present on the market automatically become a whore? Does art that wants to be perceived not have to submit to the laws of marketing and is therefore corruptible?
In return, the young woman enters into a conversation with a somewhat unruly philosopher (Andreas Lübbers) with the artist Joseph Beuys (Dirk Achim Dhonau) or with the daughter of an American artist (Isabelle McEwen). She dreams herself from one world of experience to the next. In her dream, she mutates into an art historian who gives a lecture on the position of artists in society. It ranges from religious art to Picasso's Guernica and Fernando Botero's drastic Abu Ghraib paintings to the hyped works of Jeff Koons. She examines the function of art, which she plays for the rulers in society. Can art be free at all and represent a disturbance in society? Perhaps she succeeds best in doing this in abstract art? But the disillusionment follows immediately: it was precisely this "modern" art that was instrumentalized by the CIA as a bulwark against the Eastern bloc.
The soundtrack that jazz musician Dhonau invents on drums and piano to Sara's dream journey became a companion of sounds, sounds and rhythms. The minimal theatrical means used reveal that the focus of the director McEwen in this production was clearly on the content. She incorporated an impressive wealth of well-founded information and stimulating theses. The "Tatort Kunst" was examined here in an insightful, stimulating stage evening that looked far beyond the rim of the plate and enabled many glimpses of art from the meta-level.
"How to explain art to a dreaming rabbit", Birgit Schmalmack, www.hamburgtheater.de
For recording: click here
