Uwe Rasch: DASSPIELDASLEBEN

Mit Ach und Krach is the title for three independent works, versprecher (2014), KinderStücke (2019–21) and DasSpielDasLeben (DSDL 2023/24), which illuminate each other. Their intersections are fields of experience such as affection, empathy, cohesion under specific circumstances, attempts to cope, alertness to social-normative guidelines and the ability to differentiate.

 

These pieces are also linked in different ways by a combination of auditory, performative and visual means. A kind of topography of the performance situation must be considered and designed for this hybridity (show-play-scene-music). Staging elements, forms of presentation and spatial positioning therefore have a different weight than in a purely chamber music piece. The works can only be adequately received live, whereby variations in the material organisation lead to different forms, e.g. as an audio piece, film, installation, performance, as an ensemble or music theatre project: visualisations through different emphases of the materials, always in an attempt to bring together things that diverge or (seemingly) run past each other and thus allow them to converge in order to be perceived differently.

 

15 (…) ‘Artistic visualisation confronts the continuity of the present with counter-realities. Visualisation is an attack on the hegemony of a temporal order. For the present is never identical with actuality, it is not a point on a line, not a sequential surface produced by synchronisation, nor a technically controlled space of presence, but the dispersion of the intrinsic time of living beings, things, substances, materials, which emerges from their mutual perception. Presence is always dynamic and oppositional. Accordingly, visualisation should be understood as an unfolding, a reconfiguration of dispersive intensities.’ from: Ludger Schwarte, Notate für eine künftige Kunst, Berlin 2016

(Uwe Rasch)

 

 

DasSpielDasLeben

SpielDasLebenDas

DasLEbenDasSpiel

LebenDasSpielDas

 

All happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina)

DasSpielDasLeben (DSDL) is a concept for establishing contact and is therefore pre-cooked, but not fully cooked. It is a game to be taken seriously, organised by harmlessness, but played from a point of harm. Nobody gets hurt, but a ‘harm’ becomes the starting point.

 

DSDL offers materials and time structures that can be reorganised and changed according to the location. For this purpose, a person with a precarious biography is interviewed and filmed at the respective performance location and placed in correspondence with elements of the children’s play The Game of Life. Through the game concept, the real biography is confronted with the idealised, straightforward upper-middle-class career planning as laid out in the parlour game The Game of Life.

 

All materials should be organised and ‘staged’ in such a way that new topicality and time-specific concreteness can emerge, which in the interplay of content, form and material point beyond the game itself. In this sense, I wish everyone involved the luck of having bad luck in the game.

 

It’s something you see or feel, and it’s right next to you.
(Alexander Kluge, Der Liebe Mund küßt auch den Hund)

 

The game consists of four elements:
1. biography video: At the actual performance location, a person in a precarious life situation is interviewed and filmed as a documentary–respectfully and with the aim of not ‘exhibiting misery’, but rather showing that a life is managed despite immense efforts and challenges. The protagonist is part of the ensemble and is honoured accordingly. The fragmented video is the starting point and an essential part of the performance.
2. the rules of the game Das Spiel des Lebens
3. music. The sounding material can be composed, compiled, collaged or quoted.
4. illustrations of the game Das Spiel des Lebens.

In addition, there are freely selectable playing card-like worksheets that determine the time structure, complexity and unpredictability of the course of a game (a performance). The result is a constant change of moods, sound types and genres, which are sensitively and non-illustratively set in correspondence with the filmed biography.
Uwe Rasch