The UK premiere of Landschaft at the Old Fire Station saw a great crowd treated to music, film, video rap, in German Ukrainian and English - a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Audience comments: 'Fantastic. Clever and thought provoking, and captivating to watch and listen to. Full of admiration for the artists;; 'Inspiring and moving. Poetry and film and music in s totally brilliant original way. Unlike anything I have seen before'; 'This is the kind of multi-arts form you have give yourself to. It was absurd, surreal, energised, devastatingly sad, witty, playful... a kind of intellectual art house meets the Chemical Brothers experience. Poetry was the core, but there was a visual poetry too. The translations were excellent. Collaborations across languages and cultures make for dynamic art'.
Plus two schools visits where Ulrike Almut Sandig and the wonderful student Ambassadors from he Queen's Translation Exchange worked on the poem 'vom Wasser' with year 12 and 13s.
And last but not least a workshop with Ulrike Almut Sandig and Karen Leeder on the poem 'aber hi' for all comers not necessarily with German.
Here is the beautiful version (c) Chantale Davies.
Dedicated to Friederike Mayröcker
into the light-blue that is to say with tender swallows
I sense birdsong albums in the dark
the Spring of this sinister year.
Friederike (wasn’t she here just a moment ago?)
greeted the swirling larkspur: hi!
but I am spurned with anger and lose the thread
on my little hat of fury, I’m so in the diamond.
the full of moon of yesterday floats over us both
sweetly dented the middle of its pupils black
like your hair in which sit two sisters:
the love and the sharpened magnificence of language
and illuminate for us a way through
a little wood in the heart = a dark decade
of fury and fear. but hi! despite this I dance
despite this I write gleefully: this month of the iris,
2022, war-week 16, anima mundi, head bowed
