Michael Pietsch cannot easily let go of the piece of wood. He grabs one of his carving knives and uses it next to the spot that can already be recognized as a nose. He takes away a piece of wood, also on the right, just above what will one day be the mouth. It’s just three or four small, quick movements, and the nose is already peeling out more clearly. It’s almost a type change in a few seconds. Or in twenty minutes, if you will. The piece of wood still looked like the roughly curved end of a banister post. Now, after twenty minutes of editing, it is already an abstract figure head with a strong tendency towards realism. Fantastic.
Actually, Michael Pietsch would not have had anything to carve that day. But for demonstration purposes he allowed himself to be carried away. Once it’s on the piece, it’s not easy to get away from it. There seems to be a pull there. If you watch Pietsch at this routine and dedicated work, you can imagine how he was able to make all the wonderful dolls that have also been on show in the Kammerspiele for two years. His most recent work just had its first public appearance last weekend, the warrior Yennenga in “Les statues rêvent aussi. Vision of a Return”, a simultaneous performance between West Africa and Munich, which can be seen until October 27th and then again in spring .
Pietsch needs “more than 100 hours of work” for a doll. This does not include the working hours of the make-up and costume department.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
Pietsch carves his doll heads out of linden wood. It’s neither too soft nor too hard, buttery somehow, he says. A tree like this grows for 80 years before it is felled. “I like to think that the heads have been stuck in a tree for so long.” It is probably this attitude that explains his special relationship with wood. He doesn’t squeeze something from his work material, he pulls something out.
Since Barbara Mundel has been director of the Kammerspiele, Michael Pietsch and Jan-Christoph Gockel have also been involved there. The first is an actor, puppet maker and puppeteer, the second is a director. Their joint works have a strong recognition value and set one of the great artistic accents of the house. It is a theater that is completely unbridled in its resources. Variable stage design with a love of detail, always designed by Julia Kurzweg. Live camera, image transmissions, light and sound effects anyway, sometimes comics. Plus the actors, and always the puppets by Pietsch.
Michael Pietsch’s most recent work is the warrior Yennenga in “Les statues rêvent aussi. Vision of a return”.
(Photo: Armin Smailovic)
When he is on stage he is both performer and puppeteer. For example, in “Vision of a Return” he is seen as a museum attendant – the play deals with colonial art looted – later he guides the threads of the child-sized warrior. He stands on the bridge, six meters above the stage floor. Below, Yennenga opens and closes his eyes, strokes Ida Faho’s face with his hand, and sits down in the auditorium. These are small gestures and movements, despite the distance to the cross. Of course, there are also the big ones, then the warrior rushes across the stage on her strings.
“Sometimes I think I’m still doing what I did as a child, namely acting and carving, with the same joy,” says Pietsch. Born in May 1984, he grew up in a small town between Kaiserslautern and Mainz. He believes that calm there is what got him into carving. In addition: “My father is a forester.” He started when he was five. “It was like Lego Technic for me.” He discovered the stage as a teenager and became an extra at the Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern. There he met Jan-Christoph Gockel. At 18 they had already developed their first revue, says Pietsch. Rehearsals took place in the living room at home, carpentry and carving were done in the basement at night, and the performances were then played in the Palatinate Theater. Even then, the production was big, 70 puppets, 30 sets, says the 38-year-old.
Michael Pietsch with his Franz Josef Strauss figure.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
After graduating from high school, Pietsch trained as an actor in Leipzig and was then engaged at the Oldenburg Theater, where he met Gockel again for a production of Brecht’s “Baal”. They combined acting and puppetry on the big stage. “We invented a lot, on the pedestal of which much is based today,” says Pietsch. He still has the Baal figures – like all of his estimated 300 by now – small dolls with pale faces in 1930s chic paired with expressionism. He keeps them above his workshop behind the Therese-Giehse-Halle, his puppets for the chamber play production about Ernst Toller can currently even be seen in the city museum.
Some of the dolls are as big as a small child, such as Franz Josef Strauss from the Togolese-German production “We Blacks Must Stick Together”. He is dressed by the tailoring of the Kammerspiele, the hair, real by the way, designed the mask. This is not an isolated case, all the puppets in the Kammerspiel productions equip the departments with a great deal of attention to detail. Pietsch does not always rely on realistic depictions, some he exaggerates into the grotesque as in “Your palaces are empty”, others are left abstract.
His dolls are stored tightly hung in cupboards. Depending on the staging, their expression varies greatly.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
He once built an albatross for an environmental piece entirely from plastic waste collected in Hawaii. In a “Moby Dick” adaptation, he used pig bones for the roughly left bodies. The puppets are adapted to the respective production, they do not reappear in other plays. With one exception: in the Alexander Kluge revue “Who always hopes, dies singing”, which was also about reintegrating the past, old figures are on the stage – even the puppets from the first revue in Kaiserslautern. What’s amazing is that Pietsch never learned how to make dolls, he tries it out, every time anew.
The figures are not an end in themselves. Pietsch and Gockel founded the company “peaches&rooster” in 2017. They want to create new political theatre. To do this, they travel abroad, to Burkina Faso, Congo or Togo, for example. They bring to the stage topics such as coltan mining by children, the economic exploitation of Africa by Europe, and colonial art. They do that far away from agitation or documentary theatre. “We find it exciting to deal with the world, but also with its sensuality.” The puppets are a means of making complex topics emotionally tangible. And that works. In any case with those of Michael Pietsch.