Artistic leader: Yvonne Schweidtmann
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, cinema hall
Beginning: 15:00 h
1st performance: 16:00 (approx. 1 hour)
2nd performance: 19:00 (approx. 1 hour)
End approx. 20:00
Admission free, 3G proof
The “Hell Project” at the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle is a joint project by several artists that combines dance performance and classical music, the recitation of literary texts with jazz, and all this in turn with the painting of Yvonne Schweidtmann. The stage for this is the large, so-called cinema hall of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. The fact that the project takes place on 31 October, the day before All Saints' Day, when young people everywhere celebrate Halloween today, is actually a coincidence. In view of the theme, one should rather refer to the poet Dante, who described the sphere of hell in detail, drastically and with long-term consequences in his “Divine Comedy”. As is well known, this year marks the 700th anniversary of the poet's death.
What do we associate with the concept of hell today? As a theological term for the place of damnation and punishment for human sins, hell exists in many cultures and religions. Artists, from Hieronymus Bosch to Michelangelo to Auguste Rodin, have taken up the theme. Today, in year 2 of Corona, we might associate hell with loneliness, fear or the intensive care unit. Others associate it with the repressed, the unconscious, sexuality – images that can become agonisingly apparent in dreams. In Jean-Paul Sartre's play “Closed Society”, the sentence “Hell, that's the others” falls. There, hell was a spatial situation of imprisoned people who “make each other's lives hell”. Hell is a term that also stands today for emotional states that vary from person to person and to which we are directly, though perhaps not always helplessly, exposed. (Frank Maier-Solgk))
Artists and programme
1. leader/painting: Yvonne Schweidtmann
Master student of free painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Professor Beate Schiff, several cross-over projects. Yvonne Schweidtmann's painting, which visually explores the theme of hell in a large format, in strong colours, expressively and narratively, has an impact on the cinema hall of the Kunsthalle. Its core is a figurative en-semble whose interplay has dark but also carnivalesque features. It is accompanied by landscape images – deserted projection surfaces of subjective states of mind.
2. ballet: Daniel Smith, ensemble member of the Ballett am Rhein, Düsseldorf
3. music: Aleksander Filic piano; freelance pianist, Düsseldorf
Eduard Bayer violin; member of the Essen Symphony Orchestra
Frank Michaelis saxophone; Förderpreis für Musik of the City of Düsseldorf
Gilad Kaplansky cello; member of the Düsseldorf Tonhallen Orchestra
4. singing: Thomas Huy (bass-baritone, Düsseldorf)
5. recitation: Uli Thiess (Düsseldorf, member of the Freie Jugendtheater ZAKK)