View transcript: Erich Wonder’s Imaginary Spaces

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10 to 11. Ten to Eleven.

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Erich Wonder develops the stage design for “Tristan and Isolde” in Bayreuth, a Heiner Müller production / How does Erich Wonder work?

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Red … Blue … Gold … Light … Movement … Structure / ERICH WONDER’S IMAGINARY SPACES

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Stage design for Tristan in Bayreuth

Erich Wonder

Theater is so restrictive, there is always the concrete wall in the back. It can be fun to work within the framework of that concrete wall, to develop illusions. But that was never enough for me, I always wanted to break out and take it further, and I have experimented with projects that I developed myself and then worked on with musicians or an author. Once I tried something like this with Heiner Müller, I visited him regularly, that was in the 1970s, and talked to him. I didn’t want to write a text, but I wanted, I tried to talk to an author and then develop an evening out of that, instead of always working with printed material.

Alexander Kluge

Someone who inspires you, and then you further develop the idea.

Wonder

Someone who inspires me, and then I take it further. I did two projects back then, 1979 in Düsseldorf. One was Rosebud …

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Erich Wonder, stage designer

Kluge

What was that?

Wonder

Rosebud.

Kluge

The sled from Citizen Kane?

Wonder

The sled. It’s a code word. I put that on stage, with one actor. It was performed about ten times, a proper performance. Then I did another one, called Scratch, also with one actor, and composer Heiner Goebbels did the music for that one. For the first one, I simply tried to express all my needs and my suppressed history, and I worked though my childhood memories. For instance when I couldn’t fall asleep at night, at my grandmother’s place, and she used to bring me a green light, they had those after the war, a night light. Or cars drove by and the headlights wandered across the room, through the blinds. I wanted to use proper impressions, personal things.

Kluge

But moments that no one but you could really decipher. Others might have seen similar things, but they wouldn’t be able to identify it.

Wonder

I never fully developed it. That’s what bothers me about theater, that everything always needs to be brought to a conclusion. You see the beginning, the plot, the climax, and then the resolution, and an ending. And everyone is satisfied and goes home.

Kluge

And you are content with an arrangement of raw materials?

Wonder

Yes. It could become anything. I’m interested in the gaps, the sub motifs, more than the main motifs. And the connection can happen in someone’s head a week later, while they are doing the dishes. It was interesting when people came up to me and said: “I saw this and that, and it was just like at home,” even if it was not something I had intended … entirely different interpretations became possible, and that was a great experience for me.

Kluge

Could you tell me the story of Tristan in that way?

Wonder

Yes, the first act for instance, that’s one example. It’s basically an environment in which I would like to lie down and sleep myself, for example.

Kluge

The ocean cradles you.

Wonder

The ocean cradles you, and there’s a constant, very slow movement of light in the room. A little like sliding, or falling. Like a submarine. Like if you had a tiny submarine, and you let it sink down, to Atlantis or a hidden underworld. That’s the sensation I wanted to create, basically a loss of gravity. In that sense, this room in the first act of Tristan has a lot to do with the space I created which you can see here. I think you can do something very individual with this opera. I tend to think less in political categories in a case like this. That’s the director’s job, and we are partners.

Kluge

What would you call it, the work you are doing? What would be a name for it in this century, what is the closest relation?

Wonder

Once I said that I’m more like a cameraman who works on a big scale. He is looking, but he doesn’t show the object, merely a detail of the object, or what’s behind it. When I watch TV, I often focus on the background, although it’s difficult to focus on that instead of the faces. That’s what I’m interested in. I think the term stage design is not quite correct. I think I’m an artist, I create three-dimensional images. And I have the same freedom as a painter.

Kluge

If someone told you to do Wittenberg. A student arrives from Wittenberg. Hamlet, first scene. Hamlet’s trip home, up north, to the castle on the coast. When he returns. The maids in the kitchen. If you had to dissect Heiner Müller’s play, or Shakespeare’s play into those kinds of scenes. The mother gets up in the morning. Ophelia is found. Polonius is buried after being stabbed. All the scenes that are not in the play, but necessarily need to happen, the deleted scenes – would you be interested in translating something like that into images?

Wonder

Yes, I think that’s fascinating.

Kluge

As a cameraman, you could basically create three-dimensional images, you could create paintings that can be slotted together. This way, you could develop an endless narrative of stage plays, and each would be completely different from the other.

Wonder

I think that would be great, for example.

Kluge

They would differ further from each other than, let’s say, the Bernstein performance of a symphony differs from a Solti performance.

Wonder

Yes, that’s why I find that so much more interesting.

Kluge

And that’s the main reason for why you prefer the potential, the raw material to the finished piece.

Wonder

Yes, sure.

Kluge

Could you … I see the Ring Boulevard here. You leave the theater, and there’s the Vienna Ring Boulevard.

Wonder

You need to know the backstory to understand. I was invited to participate in an outdoor installation at the Documenta in Kassel, and I agreed to do it. It was a baroque avenue. Baroque parks have a specific structure: there is a middle axis, and a lateral axis, and it leads to a pond and so on. And I chose the middle axis, and the visitors stood behind a screen, like at the movies, which was made from transparent fabric. There was an object, a very large object that approached from afar, about 500 meters away, onto which a monochromatic film was projected, with very little action, just one actor and a dog – and Heiner Goebbel’s music, which was also installed on that cart and created a spatial connection. It was more of a formal experiment, but it had an emotional effect on people. And then I applied the linear movement in space, the aspect of the Baroque I find particularly interesting, to the Landwehrkanal in Berlin. The spectators were standing on swimming pontoons, and the entire thing was mounted to a ship. It was the same thing again, but on a ship, on the water, so to speak. And it was in the No Man’s Land, a transition from baroque garden to No Man’s Land. On the left side was the Berlin Wall, and to the right was West Berlin, the park. And I did the same thing there. And then I also created the same project – there is this big steel factory in Austria, the VÖEST, and 20,000 people work there, an entire town. That’s where I wanted to do it, I took it to a bigger scale. People boarded an old ore ship, where ore – the Russians deliver ore as raw material, and export steel plates in return. The place has its own harbor, with a train, its own train. And I made use of all that, the visitors rode the train through the factory, and I amplified the effects. And high up, about 30 meters high, near the old steel furnaces, there was the same installation from earlier. But in an industrial setting. That means, I tried to cover three different locations.

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Erich Wonder, stage designer

Kluge

You shot a movie, and people could buy tickets and participate as spectators.

Wonder

I recorded it on film, but it’s very difficult to document something like this.

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Excerpts from: Maelstrom-Project by Erich Wonder

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… the wild twitches in the rhythm of its flapping on the bottom of the boat when we touch him he is dead his skin freezing his teeth white we cut his skin no blood left after the second cut his corpse goes …

Kluge

To come back to Tristan. Could you tell us, starting at the beginning: What kind of spaces are you creating, what are you doing as stage designer, in air quotes? It starts with the prelude, what do you have in mind for that?

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Stage design for “Tristan and Isolde”

Wonder

I only use light. The stage design is the cube I was talking about earlier. It is completely closed, and remains closed the entire evening. It’s a transparent veil. A proper cube that is never opened. The entire Tristan …

Kluge

You cannot look inside?

Wonder

You can look inside, but through a veil. So you never see …

Kluge

You basically only see shadows.

Wonder

No, it depends on the light. You can light the actors very clearly, but you can also blur them. It’s a closed-off world. A world in a box.

Kluge

The rulers are sitting inside this box. The chorus is outside, did I understand that correctly?

Wonder

Yes, the chorus is on the periphery. On the edge.

Kluge

Not inside the cube.

Wonder

No, they are not going to perform inside the cube.

Kluge

And the protagonists perform inside the cube.

Wonder

Inside the cube, yes. Only the protagonists are performing.

Kluge

And they are doomed to their grandiose fate.

Wonder

They cannot escape. There is no exit, for example. And there is only one entrance, when Marke appears. That one is necessary.

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Is there a curtain at all?

Kluge

What do you see when the curtain rises? Is there even a curtain?

Voice-over

[in the background, translation into Japanese]

Wonder

No, there is not going to be a curtain. There is only going to be a dissolve, and a space emerges. I have transformed the ship into a space. It’s basically an interior that indicates motion. The space doesn’t illustrate anything, but creates a situation that doesn’t actually tell a specific story. It’s supposed to be a space that conjures up the atmosphere of this scene, but doesn’t represent anything. It’s more a space inside your head, if that makes sense.

Kluge

Could you describe that? What do I see? Do I see rhythm, or shadows, what do I see?

Wonder

You see – it’s an opera where the plot is only marginally relevant and can be told in three minutes, so I tried to create meditative spaces.

Kluge

Meditative spaces.

Wonder

Meditative spaces, or monochromatic spaces.

Kluge

Monochromatic.

Wonder

Monochromatic. There is a color scheme, and I started out with an old dream of mine: to translate monochromatic painting – going back to Mark Rothko, who was basically the first one who did that back in New York – into space and movement, that’s what I wanted to try. That’s my main goal. And that leads to certain color constellations. There is a red room, that’s the first one that is broken up by lighting and turns into something other than red.

Kluge

The red space is the tent, the previous tent in which Isolde, isolated from the men and the sailors, rests with Brangane. That one is red?

Wonder

Yes, it’s difficult to describe. Usually it is a ship with a tent on it. But here, it all becomes one. And the men are on the outside. You only see their backs, the way they stand. And their backs are part of the color, the red. But when they sing, they turn around, and all of a sudden, they are people. And when they turn back around, they become a wall again. It’s a bit like a machine. There is no inside and outside anymore, only one basic space. When I’m in the position to actually realize a radical vision, and that depends on the play, I always think about the theater as a cube, a starting point.

Kluge

You forget the stage for now, so to speak. It’s a space, and in this space is a cube.

Wonder

Yes, for me an empty stage is a cube, a black box, a black cube, within which you can conjure illusions. Or you create your own box, and that’s what I did here. The three acts are basically different boxes, with different kinds of movement.

Kluge

You said you were going to start with red. And the red is broken up gradually by light while the love potion is ingested, or what?

Wonder

Light. Sodium light, like for example in yellow street lights. That light is directed at the stage, and it dissolves the red, and what remains is not a red space in that sense, but a reddish-brown space, which can be further adjusted.

Kluge

When do you begin doing that, in relation to the music? What happens to the music at the point where you dissolve the color?

Wonder

We still need to experiment a bit. We have started to work on the lighting, but the decision of what is happening when exactly is still in process.

Kluge

But you know that something is going to happen. It’s just that you don’t really care when it happens, in relation to dramaturgy or music.

Wonder

Yes, in the first scene for example.

Kluge

You don’t start out by drawing a connection to the growing passion taking hold of Tristan …

Wonder

Maybe. But we have a year of rehearsals, and during that time these things are going to come together. It happens during the preliminary rehearsals. And then we run lighting tests and try once more to get close to our ideal.

Kluge

And the second scene, the garden at night?

Wonder

Yes, the second scene is blue, and the impression – I tried to merge two realities. On the one hand, there is this abstract spatial constellation, a monochromatic space. On the other hand, there is an uber-reality, a dreamlike reality, with armors and so on. I have a hard time describing it …

Kluge

With armors? Knight’s armors?

Wonder

Yes, there are a lot of them.

Kluge

German? Chinese? Exotic? Abstract?

Wonder

Regular German ones. Only the torsos. It’s like an ocean of torsos. There is this kind of Japanese movie where people keep walking through high grass, in Kurosawa movies and so on. And I’m creating the same effect with German armors. You walk through German armors, a sea of German armors. And that’s the surreal element, I would say.

Kluge

So it’s not a garden of flowers, but a garden of the armed.

Wonder

Yes, it’s Marke’s garden. Which includes violence, and men.

Kluge

His vassals.

Wonder

Yes, basically his vassals.

Kluge

Armed men grow in the fields.

Wonder

Yes. But they are hollow. They are empty inside.

Kluge

And now the third one. There are two settings in the third act: The land of the old sun, and an ancient castle where Tristan is laid up sick.

Wonder

Yes. Therefore, the color is black and white. The color is gone.

Kluge

The color is gone.

Wonder

Color only reappears once, when the wound – the wound is ripped open. And there is a red square, which plays with the experience of constructivist painting, Malevich and so on, that’s what I’m building on.

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Yohji Yamamato, responsible for costume design

Kluge

So that’s why the black square, the red square.

Wonder

Yes, I want to work through it to see how far you can take that in opera without it becoming modernist.

Kluge

These elements haven’t really made it to Bayreuth so far.

Wonder

No. I used to paint, before I did theater, very constructivist stuff, and I studied all the – Malevich, and Mondrian and so on, I used to copy them, and studied them very closely, and I wanted to immerse myself in that world once again. Often, if you use them for theater, it ends up turning into art history. But I wanted to use it to create a functional, humane interior space.

Kluge

Do you suspect that this mechanical structure is also reflected in the music?

Wonder

Yes, I would say that’s the case.

Kluge

In Wagner’s Tristan?

Wonder

Yes, exactly.

Kluge

Even though he’s trying so hard to create expressive gestures.

Wonder

Well, I don’t think you need to try and emulate that. Sometimes, when you do the opposite, you still end up with something that he would have liked. That means, you don’t simply illustrate and follow his rhythm, but you can also work against it. And you still achieve the right outcome, I believe.

Kluge

Could you tell me what you know about Müller’s designs?

Wonder

I haven’t seen them yet. We only met today. We have a pretty open cooperation – of course we make an effort to talk about our intuitions and what we want, or what we’d like to do. But we also always try – when I work with Heiner Müller, nothing is really decided in advance. We never talk about details. Instead he says: this castle in Hamlet is an ice block, it’s an ice block, and then he leaves. And I’m left with the ice block, and that’s what I work with. He makes very general statements, and I get to work. And I accept that.

Kluge

What did Heiner Müller tell you?

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Yohji Yamamato, responsible for costume design

Yamamoto (translated from Japanese, via translator)

Mister Heiner Müller wanted something that restricts movement. Not actual restraints, but in the sense that if you want to move, your path is already determined.

Kluge

I understand. That means, characters on the verge of falling apart but held together by a costume.

Yamamoto

Yes, that’s what I think. Something like that.

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Red … Blue … Gold … Light … Movement … Structure / ERICH WONDER’S IMAGINARY SPACES