ETEL ADNAN: THERE. HIER / DORT
Literary musical performance Music & Sound Theatre & Performance‘There’ is a prose poem by Lebanese-American poet, philosopher, and painter Etel Adnan (1925 – 2021). Written in 1997, during the Yugoslav Wars, it deals with conflict between individuals, societies, and genders: “If you have an enemy, and you are obsessed by it, that enemy will occupy your head. They become you. That is a difficult situation. There are victories in history that are worse than defeats.” Musician and composer Ulrike Haage transforms Etel Adnan’s poem into an open musical-tonal fabric in the here and now of thinking and speaking, live ‘at, in, and under’ the grand piano and in dialogue with an actress.
In the setting of the first comprehensive monographic exhibition in Germany on Etel Adnan’s work, at Kunstsammlung NRW.
Photo Etel Adnan: Antonio Maria Storch
partners in crime
cast
Klaudia Ruschkowski
born 1959 in Dortmund, is an author, dramaturge, editor, curator and literary translator. After studying language, art and philosophy, she was engaged at West and East German theaters. In 1991 she was part of the founding team of the European Cultural Center in Thuringia in Erfurt, of which she was co-director until 1997. In the same year she met the poet, painter and philosopher Etel Adnan, whose works she has since translated into German, with whom she has had numerous literary and artistic adventures. Between 1999 and 2010 she conceived projects for the International Heiner Müller Society, Berlin, among others: international workshops for directors, actors, dramaturges, visual artists and composers, and co-edited three research volumes on plays by Heiner Müller for Theater der Zeit. Since 2000, conception and realization of art, culture and literature projects mainly in Germany and Italy, author of and collaborator on radio plays for Deutschlandradio Kultur, Berlin, including five radio plays on texts by Etel Adnan. Three of these radio plays together with Ulrike Haage. Since 2005 she has translated literature from English and Italian. She writes texts and essays for magazines and books. In 2021 her first novel „Red, he said“ was published.
Ulrike Haage
born in Kassel in 1957 and raised in the Ruhr region, is a composer, pianist, sound artist and radio playwright. She studied at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Hamburg and taught orchestra conducting and improvisation there for several years. She became known to a large audience in 1989 when she joined the Rainbirds as a keyboardist. Theater music, radio plays, collaborations with musicians such as FM Einheit and the actress Meret Becker and the founding of the publishing house Sans Soleil are part of her work as well as her work as a producer, script writer and solo pianist. In 2003, she was the first woman to be awarded the German Jazz Prize. Two years later, following the release of her solo album „Sélavy“, the Goethe Institute sent her on an extensive tour of Russia, during which she gave workshops for music students. Ulrike Haage works at the exciting interface of jazz, avant-garde, classical music and literature. Her solo album „in:finitum“ and the film scores Zwiebelfische (DVD) and Goldrausch (CD) were recently released. She performs as a concert pianist with her own works, is a radio play author and radio play director – three radio plays to texts by Etel Adnan, together with Klaudia Ruschkowski, cooperation in radio plays also with Veronika Bachfischer as narrator -, composes film music. Radio Play Prize of the War Blind; Prix Futura; German Jazz Prize (Albert Mangelsdorff Prize); Prize of the German Record Critics; Special Music Prize of the North German Film Festival.
credits
There. Hier/There is funded by the Kunststiftung NRW and, as part of the Alliance of International Production Houses, by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. With the kind support of C. Bechstein Centrum Düsseldorf.