Features/Theater: Achim Freyer: Abyssal high and sky-low

The expressive pops, the surreal ghosts, the cubist comes to a head: the orders of art history meet on Achim Freyer’s stages – and in the paintings of his “Kunsthaus” in Berlin-Lichterfelde – to form a roaring orgy of unification, an enchanting flirtation in which the horizontal and the vertical, the fast and the slow, the round and the angular, the bright and the dark, the shimmering and the spotty all produce mimosas and monsters.

Freyer’s drama productions and his musical theater, his paintings and stage spaces are a plea for the autonomy of images. His art is an installation made of light and loud sounds. Mostly quietly. This theater does not depict, it is a building block in a very playful sense, it places sound and movement in graceful, often very comical contexts. With colors and sounds and choreographies, encryption is carried out in a joyful, fairytale way. So to speak, abyssal and sky-deep.

Freyer elevates everything that pretends to be nature on the stage back into the sphere of signs, into the status of the mirror image in which the appearances confess their dual character: What I see is not the thing itself, but only an image of it. Maybe you can just say: alienation.

In Freyer’s work, the clocks of reality burn out, the hands melt into long threads, as in Dalí’s, and become thin ropes on which one can balance in a spun manner. Whether he staged Shakespeare or Wagner, Gluck or Handel, Schnebel and Lachenmann or whether he designed his own collages: for him, actors are dancers, singers are actors, they create body sketches between solidification and explosion, swirling improvisation and Asian-like ritual.

Born in Berlin in 1934, he was Brecht’s master student; there he learned the stubbornness that the GDR could not tolerate for very long. The pedagogy of socialist realism accused the set designer of Benno Besson, Adolf Dresen and Ruth Berghaus of “miserabilism”. His provocatively floral, kitschy, emphatically “decadent” stage and costume design resulted in the cancellation of “Clavigo,” which Dresen had staged at the Berlin Deutsches Theater in 1972. At the end of a DT tour of Italy, a short time later, Freyer briefly left the group again out of cultural-historical curiosity; he just wanted to quickly visit an exhibition, but he gave colleagues his packed suitcase on the way to the airport . When it was opened later, there were thick, heavy telephone books inside. Freyer’s cunning deception still makes the anecdotal rounds among actors today.

Jugglers are the centers of Freyer’s work: a harlequin-like chaos of color against the grey, pressed order. Delicate soap bubbles against the rationalism of all the concepts that want to explain every world instead of marveling at it as a miracle. How many clowns did he invent that balance with birdcages? The cage as an open place for the driving spirit of freedom.

This young sneaker old man is a bushy-bearded inventor. With him, a magician occupied the stages, stalked, conquered, ensnared. He made the symmetries of the commonplace dance between Berlin and Los Angeles, Zurich and Vienna, Munich and Moscow, Venice and Warsaw, Mannheim and Seoul, Stuttgart and Tokyo. So that the perspectives of all mathematical logic become blurred and the perspectives widen.

He was a loyal combatant for director Claus Peymann from Stuttgart to the Berliner Ensemble; He recently directed Peymann’s Bernhard production “Minetti” at the Bavarian State Theater in Munich. Placido Domingo called him a “genius of the imagination.”

He is a very colorful universalist who turns pieces into picture books. His theater floats, poses, cartwheels or freezes bizarrely; it is less a world of shapes than an atmosphere gallery. The most beautiful impartiality when mixing fear of death and exuberance for life. The theater as a show booth. Freyer, that is higher naivety, is a person being one with themselves.

Whoever sees something of him believes in the unification of the Antipodean; Brecht gets along with God and the world. Freyer’s visual wonders, the touchingly high tone of his floating worlds – it is a deeply humane undertaking: to say yes to life and love and melancholy.

The well-honed perspectives in the stage images rub each other’s eyes, so to speak – the big thing is small, the dwarfs have huge chances, and the mighty purrs together into a laughable casperade. Unfortunately, everything lovely, says Freyer, remains only a fantasy. That’s a sad truth. Unfortunately, everything terrible doesn’t always remain just fantasy. That is the worse truth. Art doesn’t help, but it does provide comfort. This is the most fleeting truth, but it is immortal.

This Friday, Achim Freyer (delayed due to Corona) will receive the Konrad Wolf Prize 2022 from the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts.