Four Performances:
Saturday, January 13, 2024, 5:00 pm –> for this date, reservations are not possible any more
Saturday, January 13, 2024, 8:00 pm
Sunday, January 14, 2024, 5:00 pm –> for this date, reservations are not possible any more
Sunday, January 14, 2024, 8:00 pm
Theater performance in German language
Gruppe VIOLETT (DE)
Arila Siegert: artistic direction | Ali N. Askin: music | Kerstin Schweers, Jörg Thieme, Isabel Wamig: performance | Marie-Luise Strandt: set and costume design | Helge Leiberg: live painting | Siegfried Paul: light | Carola Cohen-Friedlaender: dramaturgy
After the success of Über die Mauer in December 2022, Gruppe VIOLETT is back at the exploratorium. In their new piece Paradiesgarten, motifs from the fairytale storyteller Hans Christian Andersen – author of the autobiographical novel The Improviser – meet the ideas and visions of the painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky, who characteristically titled many of his works “Improvisations”. In Paradiesgarten, everything that Kandinsky considered important for the composition of a theater piece already resonates, so that this early draft must be seen as a preliminary stage to his famous theater work Der gelbe Klang.
Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale Der Garten des Paradieses, Kandinsky worked in Munich in 1908/09 with the composer Thomas von Hartmann and the dancer Alexander Sacharoff on a concept for one of his experimental stage compositions. Only a fragment of this work, entitled Paradiesgarten, has survived, and this is the starting point for the director Arila Siegert and the Gruppe VIOLETT to work out their own version. Based on Kandinsky’s premises that “every art comes to the fore when it can say the most necessary thing in a minute” and that “the stage gives every kind of art, including painting, the possibility of movement”, the piece is created with the means of music and dance, live painting in combination with light, as well as different variations of acting, from narration to dramatic performance. The interplay of music, set design, costumes and lighting also takes into account that Kandinsky was a synaesthete, i.e. someone who saw sounds and heard colors.
Dreams and visions carry the prince – the protagonist of the play – across lands and seas around the world in his search for the Garden of Eden. Full of hubris, he believes he can find his paradise. But in the face of temptation, he quickly forgets his proud intentions and throws all warnings to the wind. Gruppe VIOLETT tells the story of this loss of self against the backdrop of today’s creed of satisfying all desires and needs at a fast pace. Dance, music, acting, projection painting and colored light immerse the prince and the audience in the world of the fairy tale. The flood of images in our information age challenges us to question what is right. Kandinsky’s ideas still have a lot of potential today: they speak of creative freedom and the multilayered forms of existence in our lives. The prince represents the search for our individual happiness.
Andersen’s fairy tale is the starting point, but Kandinsky’s reflections on its core themes, which he recorded in his writings, flow in as texts. In this way, fairy tale moments and aesthetic considerations combine to create a meta-reflective level.
Admission: 15/12/6 € (normal price/reduced/Berlin-Pass)
The box office opens 45 minutes before the concert begins. Please pay in cash. Card payment is not possible.
When making your reservation, please use the form below to indicate which day and time you would like to reserve.
The concert on 13th January at 5 pm is sold out. Please reserve tickets for one of the other three concerts.
