intermedium
is a Media Art Biennial initiated by Bayerischer
Rundfunk/Radio Drama and Media Art and organised at changing venues in
collaboration with other public broadcasting bodies and various cultural
institutes, media centres and art houses. intermedium
is a "travelling media circus". intermedium
1 took place in 1999 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, in combination
with numerous broadcasts on radio, television and the Internet. intermedium 2 is to be held in 2001 in
collaboration with ZKM Karlsruhe. The stimulus for intermedium comes from the
medium of radio and the genre of radio drama, and it is aimed at realising
projects in conjunction with other media.
The label
intermedium rec. is a
component part of the intermedium
concept. intermedium rec. publishes
and documents productions from the festival of the same name and presents in
addition other audio-art pieces and compilations created in an intermedia
context. intermedium rec. is issued
by Herbert Kapfer, Bayerischer Rundfunk/Radio Drama and Media Art in
collaboration with the partners in the intermedium
festival.
The first CD on the new label will appear for the opening
of the exhibition Samuel Beckett, Bruce Naumann in the Vienna 'Kunsthalle'
(04.02.-30.04.2000). The production will also be presented there as a
performance on 24.03.2000.
The CD
"... the
whole thing's coming out of the dark"
samuel beckett – words / sounds & moving images
Idea and design: Klaus Buhlert, Gaby Hartel
Director: Klaus Buhlert
Voices: Raymond Federman, Barry McGovern, Natasha Parry
Helicon, trombone, slide trumpet: Uwe Dierksen
Production: BR Radio Drama and Media Art/ORF/DLR/Kunsthalle
Wien/ZKM Karlsruhe
Important texts (Molloy,
Company, L'Image) by Beckett concerned with motion, in the original English.
With the famous actors of Beckett's works Barry McGovern and Natasha Parry, the
Beckett researcher and author Raymond Federman and the musician Uwe Dierksen of
the Ensemble Modern.
intermedium rec.
001
...the whole
thing’s coming
The recordings in this production provide an impressive documentation of beckett's 'visual writing'. To the fore in the selection of texts for this cd (texts which also provided the basis for a subsequent audio-visual performance in the kunsthalle in vienna) were the author's so-called "eye pieces" together with some of his observation and movement sketches: Molloy (1951), L’image/the image (1959) and Company (1980) – three texts from different phases in the life of the irish author and nobel literature laureate. They are read by the actress Natasha Parry and the actor Barry McGovern and by the american author Raymond Federman.
The playing directions for the instrumentalist on this CD (Uwe Dierksen) are derived directly from the so-called sucking stones sequence in Beckett's novel Molloy, where the author has his protagonists invent three variations of the correct way to suck 16 pebbles – distributed between two coat or trouser pockets.
...out of the dark
"Nothing is more real than Nothing" (Beckett).
Spaces pervaded by voices, spaces which are sometimes confining like the rooms
in which Beckett's figures find themselves, or even lose themselves. They are
vast and undefined – "too vast for search to be in vain" – like
darkened theatre rooms where only speaking, articulating mouths can be seen. In
any case, however, Beckett's texts evoke disturbing visual image spaces. For
the radio play "...the whole thing's
coming out of the dark" Gaby Hartel and Klaus Buhlert have chosen
passages form Beckett's L'image/The
Image, Molloy and Company and
combined them to form a resounding, speech-flooded tonal space, in which the
music of the trumpeter Uwe Dierksen sometimes acts as a commentary and
sometimes provides contours.
"Beckett's plays have the character of armoured cars
and idiots", director Peter Brooks once wrote, "you can fire at them,
you can throw cream cakes at them: they just go their own way regardless. Apart
from their other astonishing assets, they are immune to critics. Beckett always
annoys people with his honesty. He fabricates objects. He presents them to us.
What he presents is terrible. Because it's terrible, it's also funny."
In "... the
whole thing's coming out of the dark" Samuel Beckett's disturbing,
bitter humour finds its place in the body of the speakers, the ones described
(a distinction which is basically incorrect). Molloy's compulsive actions to
systematise his movements appear grotesque, like those of a mechanical
marionette taking on a life of its own. Where the meaning is no longer
tangible, simple repetition triumphs. Words remain whose meaning has made off.
In Company, a
text used for this radio play, it is said right at the beginning: "But by
far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified." What remains
consists of rituals of language and speech, the exorcism of meaning and its
simultaneous invocation. "In the long madness of the body everything hangs
together," it is said in Molloy.
Beckett's protagonist bodies dissolve slowly in the course of time. Limbs
disappear, first still perceivable as a loss, then later we find the
naturalness of a woman reduced to a mere, constantly chattering mouth – as in Not I. Eva writes that this
disappearance of limbs and organs is a kind of stigmatisation, an external sign
that man has been touched by Nothing. The body's gradual decay begins
"when man becomes increasingly incapable of moving through space. It is by
this inability to walk that we recognise Beckett's branded ones, his
heroes." These spaces are in the dark. In a kind of self-isolation. Beyond
time, outside and empirically backed-up reality. There in the dark, this cipher
for the formless, for the body's origin and refuge, there arise the imaginary
pictures and landscapes from the persistent flow of speech of the figures.
Everything takes place inside the head, and yet these
image-provoking speech rituals find their way to the outside. Everything
becomes the listener's projection room. We look on the speakers as we would an
open, exposed interior. Speech is its own dissecting instrument. Existence is
transferred into speech, being is removed from its time. The images remain, the
sound of speech remains in which the secret of an entire world is concealed.
Samuel Barclay
Beckett
Klaus Buhlert
words
sounds
Distribution book trade: Hörsturz booksound
www.intermedium1.de
intermedium
rec. contact BR
Hörspiel und Medienkunst
STRUNZ! Herbert
Kapfer/Barbara Schäfer
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München
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