Ukraine performance in Berlin
“Favorite” is definitely not the right term for this, it’s more a reference to a sad occasion: After the Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikovska had to flee from the annexation of Crimea in 2014, she performed in front of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, which bore her refugee number as a title: “254”. Just as the killed soldiers had been covered with the Ukrainian flag, she too lay there – like dead, but with an emphasis on “like,” because there was a twitch under the yellow-blue fabric. At that time she was arrested. Now Kulikovska is in Berlin and is doing the same performance on the steps in front of the Neue Nationalgalerie until Wednesday, several times a day. After that, she breastfeeds her few-month-old baby. His father is still in Ukraine. And everyone knows what that means. Peter Richter
Small. But powerful. The “KO!” is the sampler from the Pocket Operator series.
(Photo: teenage engineering)
Calculator-sized synthesizer
The design: very important. Very own form of reduction. Heavy DIY tack in aesthetics. Bare circuit board, even bare control buttons. Stripped to the bone, the American likes to say. Which in this case might be a minor euphemism for making the parts look like a calculator infighted with an acid barrel. And lost.
The user must therefore expect to be ridiculed, since there is nothing to gloss over. But the user must also reckon with the fact that he won’t really care. Anyone who uses sees – and in this case he or she will see that the Pocket Operators (at least a few of the models), as the name already suggests, are expectedly limited, but also amazingly powerful pocket synthesizers, drum machines or even samplers. Real, usable, cheap musical instruments. No toy. No joke.
The creator is the company Teenage Engineering, which among other things developed the similarly underestimated synthesizer OP-1, which is now in the studio of many producers from all styles. And in the MoMa. Again: the design.
Which – also with the Pocket Operators – translates into a function. There are now nine models (and a few special editions, which are of course already being offered at collector’s moon prices), which the layman, who will also have fun with, might best imagine using them as a punch card: You select a sound and there, where you punch it (i.e. press the button) on the sixteen sequencer slots, it will be played when you press play. The wheels change the sound or tempo. With a few key combinations there are additional effects. For the first five minutes, the user interface frys the beginner’s brain. After that you can do it blindly.
For the professional user: Yes, especially the PO-33, i.e. the sampler, really works. Rather lo fi. With only 40 seconds sampling time. But splendid. Compared to the very good drum synthesizer Tonic, the PO-12 is still a bit archaic. The PO-14 bass synth is not recommended because it can only play the white keys without a trick. Otherwise: The perfect gift for the musician who already has everything. Jacob Biazza
Michelle Yeoh’s prancing brawls
Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
(Photo: Leonine Film)
A physical fight is also just a dance with punches and kicks. Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh’s career proves it. When her ballet dreams were shattered by a back injury in the early 1980s, it was fight film pro Jackie Chan who discovered her punching ability for the cinema. Since then, Yeoh has been thrashing, beating and sabering his way through the film history from “James Bond 007 – Tomorrow Never Dies” to Ang Lee’s masterpiece “Tiger & Dragon”. At the age of 59 she can now be seen in the role of the able-bodied laundromat owner in Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once”. And thus crowns her career. Because in this insane meta-superhero satire, she not only slaps her way through several universes as light as a feather, but infuses her character with an emotional depth that makes even the most excessive absurdity of the plot seem plausible. Timo Posselt
40 years Theater an der Ruhr
Guest performance in the Düsseldorf Hofgarten for the anniversary: The Theater an der Ruhr is celebrating its 40th anniversary.
(Photo: Achim Kukulies)
If someone imagines a modest hut under a court gardener’s house, he is greatly mistaken. In any case, the building in Düsseldorf’s Hofgarten (late baroque master horticulturists apparently had large families) is a stately, pink-painted establishment with sweeping wings. It houses the theater museum, which was awakened from a long slumber by its young boss Sascha Förster. The fact that the Theater an der Ruhr, founded in 1981 and based in Mülheim, is celebrating its 40th anniversary (postponed by one year due to the pandemic) here, of all places, opposite the Schauspielhaus, is not without a certain irony: Düsseldorf’s theater was for Roberto At the time, Ciulli was more the starting point for a politically justified flight “into the open” – towards more flexible, more diverse, less hierarchical structures.
The now 88-year-old theater founder is now the focus of a homage, an exhibition developed by the long-time costume and stage designer Elisabeth Strauß under the title borrowed from the poet Garcia Lorca: “You have to remember tomorrow”. The result is a course that is not based on chronological parameters, but looks for aesthetic connections. Performance photos in a wide variety of formats bring the history of the theater to life in an impressionistic way, so to speak. Video clips flicker across the walls. In a small room are the figurines of the costume designer Klaus Arzberger, who died young, and models of the charismatic stage designer Gralf-Edzard Habben, who is also no longer alive. The highlight is a walk-in transparent cube, designed by the Italian artist group “Anagoor”, over whose walls short sequences of productions run: By entering the room, you can immersively experience yourself as part of the Mülheim theater cosmos for a few minutes.
The Theater an der Ruhr owes its fame not least to Ciulli’s cosmopolitanism, in other words: the many guest performances all over the world – with a focus on Turkey and the Middle East. This aspect was often mentioned in the eulogies that could be heard on the opening night in the courtyard garden. Martin Krumbholz
Alone in the hotel
The 25-year-old has just returned from a trip around the world and is strolling through Paris when she discovers a small door that takes her into the Gare d’Orsay train station. It is to be converted into a museum and the hotel that belongs to it has been empty for a while when Sophie Calle of all people secretly moves in there in 1978. For two years, room 501 is the starting point of her almost archaeological investigations. Between dead cats and broken steps, she collects account books and unscrews the red-enamelled room numbers. Sophie Calle, today one of the most important artists in France, has now displayed her finds in the Gare d’Orsay Museum under the title “Sophie Calle. The Ghosts of Orsay” (the exhibition runs until June 12). And because this art is as private as it is literary, the accompanying catalog is more than documentation: it is a highly readable work. Catherine Lorch