Favorite of the week: Place of gods and technology – culture

Landscape art: Garden Kingdom of Wörlitz

The word total work of art is so easy to say, and immediately one thinks of Wagner, music drama and Bayreuth. You have to sit still there, your body is switched off for hours. The air is stuffy. Quite different in the true, only total work of art on German soil, the Wörlitz Garden Kingdom, which you can only experience in motion, walking or in a boat, with all your senses: wonderful, always new views, fresh air with the scent of flowers and water, birdsong, and everything has meaning . Not only the senses are addressed, but also the meaning. 18 bridges, from Stone Age dugouts to industrial cast iron, show the course of civilization. Temple, church, synagogue, the gods and God, above all Venus, carry the sky-blue superstructure. A pantheon is reminiscent of Rome, a small Vesuvius of Naples. Modern writers, Rousseau and Herder, have islands of their own – for we are walking into the 18th century, the age of enlightenment and sensibility, when we enter the Garden Kingdom.

This week the 250th birthday of the castle was celebrated there. Everyone knows its entrance facade because the White House in Washington, to be precise, was modeled on this first neoclassical building on German soil. Florian Illies gave a speech that emphasized the mythical-utopian character of the Garden Kingdom: wild cultural collage and ecological model in one, place of the gods and technology, intoxication and rationalism. Illies quoted from the new novel by Emmanuel Maess (“All in all”), which tests the Wörlitz feeling: “You gain a different relationship to time here, historical, aesthetic, existential, erotic, even chronometric. Kairos instead of Chronos.”

The true total work of art Wörlitz can only be experienced actively, hiking, looking and thinking. You should always go there, and that’s what Bayreuth does, too. Admission is not limited, the minimum time you should take is two Wagner operas. Here, too, time becomes space, the moment becomes eternity. Prince Franz, the lord of the castle, laid the foundation stone for the beginning of spring in 1773: to this day the signal for the annual time-space journey. Gustav Seibt

Stage: Inclusive Theater Rambazamba

Nele Winkler in “Doña Rosita stays single or The Language of Flowers”.

(Photo: Phillip Zwanzig)

Rosita is sitting upstairs in the window. “I love you with all my heart, with all my body,” she tells the young man in the yard below. She says it as deeply as she feels, and she will keep this feeling for years and decades, long after her loved one is gone, on another continent. It should be clear to Rosita that he will never return, despite promises of marriage, and yet she remains waiting, remaining true to her love. It’s not romantic. Federico García Lorca wrote his play “Doña Rosita stays single or The Language of Flowers” in Granada around 1900, he wrote it against “Spanish kitsch and hypocrisy”, also as an indictment of the position of women and prescribed morality . It’s a drama of torpor.

At the inclusive Berlin Theater Rambazamba, Nele Winkler plays Rosita, Angela Winkler’s daughter who was born in 1982 with Down’s syndrome. She has been part of the ensemble since 1996. She gives her character so much determination, emotion and seriousness that this Rosita radiates an idiosyncratic power in all her strangeness. There is no sacrifice. When she says, “I don’t want to lose my illusions,” it sounds very self-determined. The director Gisela Höhne, founder and director of the Rambazamba Theater until 2017, selected the play for and because of Nele Winkler and staged it with a fine Spanish flair: as a kind of domestic drama about women, ten in number, more or less all without men (could) get along, but talk about them all the time and are fixated on them. Two of them seem like a married couple in their hearty exchange of blows: Rosita’s aunt, played – as a guest – by Margarita Broich (known from the Frankfurter crime scene), and the energetic housekeeper, swept away by the Rambazamba audience favorite Eva Fuchs. Spanish live music, lascivious dances, nature projections, an actor with a bull’s head mask – Höhn succeed in creating atmospheric images. Unfortunately, the play is now on hiatus until June. Instead, Leander Haußmann’s enchanting production “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” based on the film by Miloš Forman is running again at the Rambazamba. It definitely should have been part of the Berlin Theatertreffen. Christine Dossel

Movie: Sandrine Kiberlain

Favorites of the week: Sandrine Kiberlain in "Diary of a Paris Affair"

Sandrine Kiberlain in “Diary of a Paris Affair”

(Photo: New Visions)

There is no definition of what makes a great actress. In any case, Sandrine Kiberlain is at her best when she puts her personal stamp on a character. In Emmanuel Mouret’s “Diary of a Parisian Affair” she met a married man as Charlotte, with whom she is now entering into a liaison. It should kindly not spill over into the emotional, and occasionally Charlotte knocks out unspeakable sentences with an innocent expression. She did it in a similar way in “Rien sur Robert” or as “Mademoiselle Chambon” (2009): disarmingly open, delightfully silly. In the “diary” she surprised her new lover on the first date with her plan to go to bed with him right away and never love him. Of course that goes wrong. But showing up in bed with a plastic dinosaur in your hand and still appearing erotic: chapeau. Susan Vahabzadeh

Classic: Offenbach’s cello duos

Favorites of the week: Jacques Offenbach, cello duos with Giovanni Sollima and Andrea Noferini.

Jacques Offenbach, cello duos with Giovanni Sollima and Andrea Noferini.

(Photo: jpc)

The fact that the composer Jacques Offenbach began his unique career as a cellist has faded into the background in view of his world-famous operettas. But today’s cellists have rediscovered the composer of amusing cello music, at least in the studio. Here, too, Offenbach is a master of instrumental wit and rhythmic verve. In addition to concertos, cello chamber music with piano and salon pieces, he has written almost forty duets for two cellos. In addition to practice pieces for students, there are concertante and brilliant duos that require real virtuosos. The cello improviser Giovanni Sollima and the excellent cellist Andrea Noferini took the time to record all the Offenbach duos for Brillant Classics. One can enjoy Offenbach’s cello ingenuity in all directions. Harold Eggebrecht

Pop: The rapper Ski Aggus

Favorites of the week: This guy here as Chancellor, please!

This guy here as Federal Chancellor, please!

(Photo: Soundcloud)

A rapper in a jacket, shorts and mirrored ski goggles wants to be chancellor. At least Ski Aggus is going on an “election campaign tour” in the fall, which is the title of his planned tour. The comeback of the noughties would be on the election program, including a mullet hairstyle and Ed Hardy glitter on the shirt. And musically, the rapper also plays with millennial nostalgia feelings. In “Party Sahne” he quotes the melody of the 2000 hit “Jerk it Out”, in “Hubba Bubba” he sings about brightly colored chewing gum. If you’ve grown out of a Hubba-Bubba youth, you immediately feel transported to better times, with wild parties and hanging out with the Atzen, with groovy techno and trance sounds and quick-witted puns – in short: you feel as young as you’ve probably never been. “I’ve never been on the stock exchange, but I used to be a broker,” Ski Aggus raps. And you’re longing to finally be really broke again. Lilian Koehler

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