Villa Aurora Events Archive
September 2015
Sasha Waltz - A portrait
Los Angeles
„Villa @ Goethe“ presents
Dir.: Brigitte Kramer, Germany, 72 min. German with English subtitles, digital.
Throughout her career, German choreographer Sasha Waltz has increasingly incorporated film, theatre, dance, painting, architecture, and especially music into her productions.
Waltz’s seminal 1996 production “Alley of the Cosmonauts” helped to establish her reputation as one of Europe’s best-known and most exciting choreographers.
Her 2005 production of Henry Purcell’s “Dido & Aeneas” marked the beginning of her work on “choreographic opera”.
Throughout her career Sasha Waltz has increasingly incorporated film, theatre, dance, painting, architecture, and especially music into her productions.
Brigitte Kramer’s film documents Waltz’s work from 2005 to 2013.
Pairing unique interviews of Waltz with excepts from her productions of Bodies, Impromptu, Dido and Aenas, Medea and Passion (in collaboration with contemporary composer Pascal Dusapin),Matsukaze (with Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa) as well as her exhibition at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), Sasha Waltz A Portrait, offers an intimate and insightful look at the work of the dancer, director, and choreographer.
Sasha Waltz is visiting Los Angeles as part of a three-month honorary fellowship at the Villa Aurora.
Discussion with Choreographer Sasha Waltz, moderated by Stephan Koplowitz, Dean of The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at Calarts, and reception following the screening.
Sasha Waltz studied dance and choreography in Amsterdam and New York. Together with Jochen Sandig, she founded the company Sasha Waltz & Guests in 1993, followed by the Sophiensæle in 1996.
From 2000 to 2005, she was a member of the artistic directing team of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin. Over the following years, she developed a new genre, choreographic opera, and also focused on the Dialoge projects – short, intensive encounters between musicians, visual artists, dancers and choreographers in distinct spaces. Her most recent project Sacre was created in collaboration with the Mariinsky Theatre St. Petersburg.
Among other distinctions, she received the French cultural medal “Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” and in 2011, the Order of Merit from the Federal Republic of Germany. Sasha Waltz has been a member of the Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts) in Berlin since 2013. For its anniversary year 2013, Sasha Waltz & Guests has been named “European Cultural Ambassador” by the European Union. Most recently Sasha Waltz & Guests was awarded the “george tabori ehrenpreis” 2014 by Fonds Darstellende Künste.
With this program, Villa Aurora continues its collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles.
Under the label "Villa @ Goethe", artists residing at the Villa Aurora have the opportunity to showcase their projects (past, present, and future) with the friends, patrons and guests at the Goethe-Institut.
ECLECTIC SALON
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Los Angeles, CA 90272)
Information
Like Cage, Gerhard Stäbler is an energetic shaman of possibility, interested in generating innovation by any means available. (…) He is a brilliant transformer of existing languages and signifiers – but, like Cage himself, he is a clear-eyed, conscious person, aware that we can all exist in our everyday worlds, and always ready to imaginatively project aspects of that awareness onto the people and spaces that are around us.
Paul Attinello
Gerhard Stäbler was born in 1949 in Wilhelmsdorf, near Ravensburg in Southern Germany. In 1968 he began studies in composition at the Nordwestdeutsche Musikakademie in Detmold, continuing at the Folkwang-Hochschule in Essen. The Cornelius Cardew Memorial Prize (1982) was the first in a series of awards, prizes, and commissions.
Stäbler has been active not only as a composer, but also in politics and social organizations. He founded the the Aktive Musik new music festival and was the artistic director of the 1995 World Music Days of the ISCM, held in the Ruhr Valley. Since 2012, the two composers have put together a series of concerts at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the series Naturally Beautiful! in Benrath Castle.
Kunsu Shim was born as the son of re-migrants from Japan in 1958 in Busan, South Korea. The ocean provided the adolescent Shim with the experience of spatial openness and expanse. This notion can be seen later as the basis of his production. He studied composition in Seoul and in Stuttgart/Germany with Helmut Lachenmann. His concert tours led the award-winning composer around the globe, he has been awarded several artists residences and lectured at Folkwang-Hochschule. Kunsu Shim resides permanently in Germany.
A Visit to Philipp Lachenmann's Studio
Berlin
In September, we organized a studio visit with our fellow Philipp Lachenmann for the Friends of the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle. In a talk filled with anecdotes, Philipp gave the attendees a tour of his work and his creative process.
Understanding Stalin
Villa Aurora (520 Paseo Miramar, Los Angeles, CA 90272)
Information
Between Vision and Supervision.
Lion Feuchtwanger in Moscow, 1937
To gain insight into Soviet society – was that at all possible for a Western intellectual visiting the Soviet Union in the 1930s? What did Feuchtwanger see and realize when he went to Moscow in the winter of 1936/37 and was received by Stalin? How far did his knowledge and awareness of a way of life so radically different from everything he knew extend? In any case, in his travelogue Moscow 1937 Feuchtwanger showed a lot of understanding for Stalin and his policies. The books ends on a triple emphatic “Yes” to the USSR, including praise for its societal structure and a justification of the show trials. The political reasons are obvious: The German-Jewish author, driven into exile by Hitler, placed his faith in the Soviet Union to mount the determined resistance against National Socialism which he found Western democracies reluctant to engage in. But other motives are also identifiable; there are irritations, contradictions, inconsistencies in Feuchtwanger’s behavior and underneath the smooth surface of his travelogue. It is these that this lecture will explore.
Anne Hartmann is an assistant researcher and lecturer in the Slavic Department / Lotman-Institute for Russian Culture at the University of Bochum. Her research interests include history and culture of Soviet-occupied Germany and the GDR, the culture of Stalinism, GULAG and the idea of "perekovka", German writers in Soviet exile, Feuchtwanger and other Western visitors to the USSR.
7th Conference of the International Feuchtwanger Society
Los Angeles
Information
Hosted by the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library of the USC Libraries, the conference will also feature programs and events developed in collaboration with USC’s Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies, USC’s Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life, Villa Aurora, and other institutions in the Los Angeles area. The conference will explore Lion Feuchtwanger’s Jewish identity, his family background, and the Jewish milieus he belonged to in Germany, France, and Southern California. We will emphasize the intersections of German and Jewish identities and ask how they changed with the rise of the Nazis and the experience of living in exile. We will also devote attention to Feuchtwanger’s knowledge of Jewish sources and the connections to Judaism that ran through his life and work. A particular focus will be on new research concerning Jewish themes in Feuchtwanger’s works (and in the works of his brothers and other emigrants).
Preliminary Program and Time Schedule
Thursday, September 17, 2015
9:30AM Participants will be picked up from hotel and shuttled to Villa Aurora, Pacific Palisades
11-11.30AM Welcome address
11:30AM-1:00PM PANEL 1: Setting the Stage: Lion Feuchtwanger and Judaism Chair: TBD
Jonathan Skolnik: Judaism and Exile in the 1930s: Lion Feuchtwanger in Comparative Context
Anne Hartmann: Lion Feuchtwanger and the Question of (his) Jewish identity in Stalinist Russia
Margrit Frolich: Lion Feuchtwanger’s Jewish Historical Consciousness in America
1:00-2:30PM Lunch break
Jack Boas: Menno Ter Braak and Lion Feuchtwanger, 1933-1940
3:30-5PM IFS Member-Meeting & Dinner
5PM Shuttle buses leave for Santa Monica/Aero Theater
6:00PM Frank Stern Introduction to Jud Suess (1934)
Shuttles return to Hotel
Friday, September 18, 2015
9:30-11:00AM PANEL 4: Other Writers And Judaism II
Chair: Joerg Thunecke
Sven Steinberg: Edgar Hahnewalds Roman “Karl Herschowitz kehrt heim”
Michaela Enderle-Ristori: Umwertung aller Werte? Heinrich Mann und das Judentum
Doris Berger: Light & Noir. The Light & Noir exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center and audience
reactions to it
11:00-11:15AM Coffee Break
11:15AM-12:15PM PANEL 5: Feuchtwanger and Israel
Chair: TBD
Yael Feldman: “The Old man has Returned to his People”: The Reception of Feuchtwanger’s
Josephus Trilogy in Pre-state Israel
Paul Lerner: Feuchtwanger and Arnold Zweig on the Nature and Challenge of the Jewish People
12:15-1:45PM Lunch Break
1:45-2:45PM PANEL 6: TBD
Chair: TBD
Sean Nye: From Sepp Trautwein to Bertram de Born: Feuchtwanger on Music, Exile, and Religion
Marje Schuetze-Coburn: Aufbau & Lion Feuchtwanger: Perspectives on News and Culture as Exiles
2:45-3:00PM Coffee Break
3.00-4.30PM PANEL 7: TBD
Chair: TBD
Galit Hasan-Rokem: Sources of Complexity: Biblical, Rabbinical, and Mystical Elements in Jud Suess
Ian Wallace: Jued Suess (1934): The British Dimension
Adrian Feuchtwanger: A Post-Nationalist Weimar Novel? A Third Generation View of Der Juedische
Krieg (1932)
4:30-4:45PM Coffee Break
September 19, 2015
9:30-10:30AM PANEL 8: Judaism & Christianity in Feuchtwanger’s Work Chair: TBD
Detlef Blasche: Das Christentum in Feuchtwangers Werk (in German) Romana Trefil: Das Judentum Feuchtwangers und seine literarische Reflexion vor dem Hintergrund historischer Aspekte und unter Beruecksichtigung seiner im US Exil enstandenen Romane Die Juedin von Toledo und Jefta und seine Tocher
10:30-10:45AM Coffee Break
10:45-12:00PM 20 years of the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at USC - a tour & exhibit
12:00-1:00PM Lunch Break
1:00-2:00PM PANEL 9: Graduate Student Papers I Chair: TBD
Marlene Danzinger: “Wie Punkersdorf unter Palmen” The Voices of Uncredited Viennese Exile Actresses
Sarah Kaufmann: “Die Zweite Reihe” Viennese Exile Filmmakers Behind the Screen
2:00-2:15PM Coffee Break
2:15-3:45PM PANEL 10: Graduate Student Papers II Chair: Michaela Ullmann
Adi Nester: German and Jewish Identity in the Works of Erich Zeisl and Paul Ben-Haim
Sebastian Musch: Feuchtwanger between Judaism and Buddhism Laura Marie Reiling: „Exilwirrwarr“ – Heimat, Haus und jüdische Identität in Volker H. Altwassers Bruno Frank-Roman Glückliches Sterben
Fellows&Friends @ Black Mountain College
Berlin
Founded in 1933 in the U.S. state of North Carolina, Black Mountain College quickly gained fame for its progressive educational approach and the many prominent figures who taught and studied there, and it had a major influence on the development of the arts in the second half of the 20th century.
At the end of September, we visited the exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin with Fellows&Friends. This is the first time the museum has dedicated an extensive exhibition to the legendary college in Germany. Curator Gabriele Knapstein gave us a guided tour of the exhibition and provided fascinating insights into the curatorial concept and its development.
The college’s founders sought to establish a democratic, experience-based, interdisciplinary educational institution in line with the progressive educational ideas of the philosopher John Dewey. The exhibition traces the history of this university experiment in broad strokes. In its early years, the college was strongly influenced by German and European émigrés—among them several former Bauhaus teachers such as Josef and Anni Albers, Alexander “Xanti” Schawinsky, and Walter Gropius. After World War II, creative impulses increasingly came from young American artists and scholars who commuted between the urban centers on the American East and West Coasts and the rural Black Mountain. Until its closure in 1957, the college remained shaped by the ideas of European modernism, the philosophy of American pragmatism, and a pedagogical approach that emphasized both individual initiative and social competence.