Chris Dercon will replace Frank Castorf as director of the Volksbühne. The Belgian has led the Haus der Kunst and the Tate Modern in London. Is the well-connected art manager right in the theater?
From Andrian KreyenfeldThere is hardly a person who can stir up trouble as charming as Chris Dercon. He has for many years made great museums and is now in 2017 as director of the Volksbühne in Berlin.
In Munich we know Dercon. Then he took from May 2003 to March 2011, the House of Art. There are few museum directors who are such an integral part of the life of their city, as Dercon in these years. It was not even his city, and not his country. On the contrary, he had as one of the most delicate houses of Europe into acting. He led with a commanding permeability, which he took as the Munich for that they do not even resented him, as he said in an interview with this newspaper cursed again able to leave in 2011.
New director for Berlin Volksbühne Daring coup
Chris Dercon is currently head of the London Tate Gallery, but will soon take over as successor to Frank Castorf the Berliner Volksbühne. Does it make sense to appoint a man to the museum director?
Charm in Berlin is still missing. Already weeks before Berlin’s mayor and Culture Senator Michael Müller confirmed the rumors about the occupation of the successor Frank Castorf on Thursday in the current hour of the Chamber of Deputies, the debates about the 56-year-olds were indeed determined by great turmoil. Claus Peymann scolded because’ll probably still an “event shed” arise. Dercon itself but only on Thursday flew from London, where he leads the Tate Modern, to Berlin, where on Friday a press conference to take place. . In the run so dominated once the uncertainties of the world of theater and old German discourses about the culture, their limits and regulations conversation
Dercon brings big names: Alexander Kluge, Romuald Kamarkar and Boris Charmatz
It then looks fast even a scene to describe such a complex character like that. Munich on one of those summer afternoons, for whom the world this city so envy Behind the Nazi construction at the Prince Regent road shimmered the sun through the canopy of the English garden, where far too many people of so industrious city strolling and surfer on the Eisbach a few meters fell further below the bridge on its shaft.
Dercon led a New York filmmaker through the house and went with him into the darkness of the basement. As he stood in the engine room, which with its heating fittings from the thirties still looks like the setting for one of these submarine movies in which the captain leads a losing battle against the elements, the scoreboard enemy. The captain you frequently attached to him because of his silver-gray beard and Schopf, its catfish trains in the face.
He pointed to the control panel with brass mounts, explained how deep here the history of the house is buried, where Adolf Hitler once celebrated German art, while a few streets was further ostracized in a fully gerammelten Gallery “Degenerate Art”. Up in the spacious halls Dercon had let the plaster and the visor tear. The house should stand by his past. Down here, but he researched further. A young historian helped him. Only in this way, he found he could the full force of contemporary art stage credible. The Political Art of Chinese dissident Stars Ai Weiwei, the monumental photographs by Andreas Gursky, psychedelic madness of Yayoi Kusama.
Probably Dercon was the best man to not rid the house of his curse, but to find a way to deal with it. Therefore, the fears are now probably too great that he now is glamor figure with an international network a break with what already exists forces, the Rockstar Patti Smith Fashion Tycoon Miuccia Prada and the chief executive of the oil company BP to the painter Gerhard Richter and the Senegalese curator Koyo Kouoh enough.
Is he any good reason for the theater? Because his exhibitions also always had great performances from the noisy opening on the Framework Programme with the academic debates to the children’s workshops in the shadow of the objects? The end of the seventies, early eighties, the Belgian-born and studied theater at Leiden in addition to art history and film theory.
He then taught video and cinema in Brussels before he was Program Director to the PS 1988 1 went. It was a former school in the New York City borough Queens, which was still a radical cultural center before it later became a branch of the Museum of Modern Art. This was followed by the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and the Museum Bijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Then Munich. Now London. Soon Berlin. And precisely because – Theater
“A very good man, not a mere Event Makers”
Chris Dercon itself can not say much. Three people are already set, he wants to bring – the filmmaker Romuald Karmakar, the dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz and Alexander Kluge. He has also worked with Castorf Dercon predecessor. On Thursday, he said the SZ: “I stage not in the theater I will work with Dercon, as I have worked with Castorf and will work The Volksbühne for me is the fourth opera house in Berlin, a friction point between theater, opera and.. other arts. And Chris Dercon is a very good man, not a mere event makers. He is a good figure for this friction point. “
Is that him? Is it possible for a man who led the House of Art as a cosmopolitan cultural center while his story aufarbeitete so expect it so seriously the core of the Volksbühne as German ensemble theater, such as all kinds of satellites that it will start from there? Is his occupation a coup? And if so, for whom? On all questions there will be answers. Final probably only 2017th
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