Creating a window that helps Europe to understand Africa better: in Burkina Faso director Christoph Schlingensief and architect Francis Kéré are launching a very unusual aid project with their Opera Village

BY ANDREA JESKA

The laying of the foundation stone was accompanied by Goethe as the spiritual father of this special moment. He was also probably one of the greatest and most intense influences in the life of Christoph Schlingensief (49), the distinguished German theatre and opera director, filmmaker and action artist. “Stay a while, you are so beautiful” – using the words of the famous German poet he called out to the moment, which nevertheless vanished, stealing away across the savannah towards the African horizon.

An almost empty piece of earth, 5 hectares in size, in the West African country Burkina Faso: 14 chieftains and a few hundred spectators from the surrounding villages came on 8 February. And the wind rustled in the monkey bread trees at the birth of the enterprise that is to become Christoph Schlingensief’s festival hall. When described in simple terms, the story is quite short. A charismatic artist falls desperately ill, rebels, contemplates, dreams, allows his desires and visions to grow again. It’s the re-invention of art, not only for the sake of art itself, but also as a symbol of personal resurrection. The idea emerges: a festival hall for Africa. In June 2009 Schlingensief sets off on his journey, visits Cameroon and Tanzania. He finds the landscape he is looking for in Burkina Faso, in the village of Laongo, about an hour away from the capital Ouagadougou. And he finds the man he is looking for to give shape to the idea, to integrate Africa’s cheerfulness and its light: Francis Kéré, an award-winning architect from Burkina Faso who lives in Berlin. Together, they dream and plan: an opera house, a school where children are taught, among other things in classes for film and music. A clinic, workshops, a guest house – a building like a snail’s shell that grows from the centre outwards, made from the earth of Burkina Faso, from the country’s own soil. It is to be a village, an Opera Village, filled with African life and music. It’s a part of the present, but with education and training it will be part of the future, too. It unites the opera as a symbol of European tradition, and the village as the quintessence of the African community.

Schlingensief corrects any false notions about his project: he’s not aiming to create a second edition of Bayreuth’s Wagner Festival. Rather, he sees his idea as support for domestic cultural efforts. And his concept is championed by Filippe Savadogo, Burkina Faso’s minister of culture. “The Opera Village of Laongo will give young people the opportunity to discover and develop their talents in a favourable environment. It will be a place where European and African cultures meet, even the cultures of the world,” Savadogo writes in weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT. Laongo is a well-known area in Burkina Faso. It has a sculpture park, and festivals are familiar in Burkina Faso as well. Since 1969 Ouagadougou has been the venue of the Pan African Film Festival, which is known in both Africa and in the former colonial countries. Burkina Faso is the centre of African theatre. And the ornamental designs and patterns with which the women decorate the walls of the huts are internationally recognized as great art.

Schlingensief says that we should learn from Africa, that the purity of life and art are united in his project which marries his idea of art with active development aid. Schlingensief’s enthusiasm replaces the gloomy image of warring Africa with the bright hope of an all-embracing culture. He persuades others to join him as well: Germany’s Federal President as a spiritual and moral supporter, private donors, such as the Swedish writer Henning Mankell, the German Hollywood director Roland Emmerich and the musician Herbert Grönemeyer. But along with them many small donors have contributed by raising 220,000 euros so far. The Federal Foreign Office is giving a quarter of a million euros, the Federal Culture Foundation and the Goethe-Institut are also donating to the project. Meanwhile over a million euros have been collected already to realize the existing ideas.

“The building is an improvisation,” says Francis Kéré. “We’ll carry on building continually, nothing is linear – that wouldn’t fit in with Africa at all. In Africa the whole of life is an improvisation.” Kéré expects the festival hall to be “operational” before the end of this year.The festival hall has become the main focus of his work. “Yes, we need this building. It’s a window that will help Europe to understand Africa. In this building we simply gather and bundle what is already there, and we show it to the West. Even now everything is multiplying. We have a sponsor for a music school, and we African companies who want to help and donate. The dynamics are amazing.” Apart from that, he points out that the project is creating jobs. “We’ve trained 40 people. A small market has now developed at the construction site, and people come from further away to see what’s happening.”

Christoph Schlingensief is already planning the first performances. The idea soars on the wings of his inspiration. The project is financially secure and is sure to survive. And so, this visible trace of the director will remain – the moment that is too beautiful to disappear.

Source: Deutschland Online, 26 Febaury 2010. Photo: Aino Laberenz

An opera house in Africa. With a theatre stage, cafeteria, workshops, a school, infirmary and accommodations for the artists – Christoph Schlingensief’s dream is coming true. Only two months after the decision for a plot in Burkina Faso, the laying of the foundation stone for the opera house supported by the Goethe-Institut was now celebrated near Ouagadougou.

BY SUSANNE LETTENBAUER

Before the opera village, installations are needed: bright containers in the savannah sand, tidily arranged in a semicircle. They were shipped over a thousand kilometres from the Ruhr to Zinairé. Powdered by harmattan, the winter Sahara wind, they are filled with donated props from the Ruhrtriennale. Behind them lie picturesque granite blocks and a view across the African savannah. The place certainly has something.

Schlingensief at the laying of the foundation stone: theatrical, forceful, magical – or dusty and dry (Photo: Susanne Lettenbauer)

Although he’s not an esoteric, we all have antenna in our heads, says the cheerful conceptual artist Christoph Schlingensief. Whoever has been to this sparse place has had to deal with introspection, as Schlingensief puts it. Even sacred ceremonies have been held here. The place could be called dramatic, theatrical, forceful, magical – a natural stage on which Lysander and Oberon leap from the thorny acacias. It could also just be called a dusty, dry plateau.

Surrounded by smaller and larger granite blocks, it is a good 30 kilometres or 45 minutes’ drive from Ouagadougou on an African off-road trail, past lean goats and dozing donkeys, past small, square clay houses in the same ochre colour as the thorny savannah around them. It is the home of farmers, eighty percent of whose children have never seen the inside of a school, not to mention an opera house. This is where deceleration begins, says Schlingensief.

No more talk of an African Bayreuth

It is on the semicircle, at the foot of which an endless savannah park landscape begins. Before laying the foundation stone, the village elders had to ask the town. It said yes. Now, this metal tube lies in the African earth filled with plans and drawings, the foundation stone for a dream, the guarantee of eternity for an exorbitant idea.

So, we have a stony hill for the African opera house, the opera village, as Christoph Schlingensief more modestly began calling his life project a while ago. There is no more talk of an African Bayreuth, of classical music for the natives, but instead of a home for a school with 500 pupils, equipped with African musical instruments and western film cameras. It has room for an infirmary and workshops, built according to the latest low-energy building standard.

The idea for it all has busied the conceptual artist and director Christoph Schlingensief for quite some time. He collected money during his autumn reading tour and advertised the project on talk shows and on his own website.

Architect Francis Kéré, a native Burkinabé who once came to Germany on a scholarship from the Carl Duisberg Society, is bringing solar heat and collectors to the savannah – an experiment that is highly praised by the government and local population. Remdoogo, as the project is called on huge white banners for the laying of the foundation stone, is an opportunity for the people of the high plateau. Kéré’s Berlin architectural office provided an elegant blueprint and model.

Ever since his first encounter with Schlingensief, educational minister Philipp Savadogo has welcomed the unusual village project. The attending dignitaries such as the mayor of the neighbouring town of Zinairé agree with him fervidly. The women sit in the shade of the stark trees with the children, the future pupils who will someday attend school here. At a three percent population growth rate, it will not take long before the 300 places are taken in the music and film classes. There will be no grand pianos in the classrooms, at least not at first, assures Schlingensief, but later, you never know what may happen, maybe there will be, too.

In his speech, impatient and overflowing, pressing and then again full of energy in spite of his illness, he stresses, as he did in the Christmas edition of Zeit’s feuilleton and in talk shows: we are stealing from Africa for our health. To learn from Africa, Federal President Horst Köhler wrote, means being able to adapt to new things. For those Mossi that understand French, it is a confirmation of the opportunities that the opera village could offer them.

Expectations are very high; the laying of the foundation stone made that clear. The first part will be standing by December, as Francis Kéré, attending along with his father, an honourable chief and his festively dressed entourage, discloses his plans. Yet, this too was important for Christoph Schlingensief in his one-hour speech: the pressure has to be taken off the project. No hasty obligations to enter into cooperation with the diverse local artists’ scene, and certainly no fixed festival programme. The first production is already in preparation in rehearsal rooms in the capital city. Via Intolleranza after Luigi Nono, a work with which Schlingensief wants to examine the theme of intolerance. It will not be a folklore club, the director promises, and it is certainly something arduous, but it is a work to at first not disturb the opera village.

© Goethe-Institut, 10 February 2010
 
 

Berlin director Christoph Schlingensief has begun what may be his most ambitious project yet: building an opera house in the heart of the African savannah.

Christoph Schlingensief, the German director best known for his edgy stage revival of Wagner’s opera Parsifal, is no stranger to outlandish ideas. But the 49-year-old may have just embarked on his most unusual quest yet: building an opera house in one of the poorest countries in the world.

On Monday, Schlingensief laid the keystone for an opera house in Burkina Faso, the landlocked African country where 90 percent of residents are dependent on subsistence farming. “The people in Burkino Faso are extremely warm-hearted and welcoming,” Schlingensief told the German radio station Deutschlandradio Kultur. “The children are very intelligent and musical. And although the country is very poor, it has a certain inner peace.”

More than opera

The opera house, designed by Burkinabe architect Francis Kere, is to be erected in a village on the outskirts of the capital Ouagadougou. The village will also include a school for theater and music, performance spaces and a clinic. Schlingensief, who is suffering from lung cancer, said his illness inspired his interest in the ambitious project.

“Africa is a place that has always meant a great deal to me, and that has given a great deal to me,” he said. “I have the feeling that I can come here and give the pressures of Berlin and the life that I live there over to the world.” The building is part of the “African Opera Village,” an aid project jointly funded by the Goethe Institute, Germany’s cultural outreach organization, and the government-funded Federal Foundation for Culture.

‘The big white man’

In a country where many residents don’t have access to clean water, the decision to build an opera house might seem a bit unusual. But Schlingensief said the goal of the project was to give the people of Burkina Faso the resources to express their own culture. “We want to help them without pointing the big finger of the white man from Europe,” Schlingensief told the German press agency DPA.

The cultural minister of Burkina Faso, Filippe Savadogo, said that the “Opera village” will bring a great deal to Africa. “The exchange between people is the future,” Savadogo said, adding that the project would solidify the friendship between the German people and the people of Burkina Faso. “With this project, we have finally entered the 21st century,” said Savadogo.

Source: smh/dpa, February 9th, 2010

The ceremony took place in presence of many political and cultural representatives. Amongst them the minister of culture of Burkina Faso, Filippe Savadoogo, and chiefs from the region.

Berlin - A leading German operatic director, Christoph Schlingensief, 49, is to lay the foundation stone on February 8 in Burkina Faso for an 'African Opera Village,' a Berlin-funded aid project to encourage musical theatre.

In an interview Sunday in Berlin, Schlingensief, 49, said he was flying to the African nation this Wednesday for the preparations. He expected 13 shipping containers with equipment to arrive there by sea and road in the next few days. The spiral-form building, to be erected in a village on the outskirts of Ouagadougou, will include a school to teach music and film, performance spaces, workshops and a clinic. Classes are scheduled to begin in October. The maverick director is well known in Germany for his provocative, taboo-breaching plays and his production between 2004 and 2007 of Parsifal which is still in repertory at the annual festival in Bayreuth of the operas of Richard Wagner. In the interview, Schlingensief rejected criticism that the project, which aims to establish an annual opera festival in Ouagadougou, was imposing elite European culture on the people of Africa. He said he was entitling the project, 'Learning From Africa.' 'This won't be a snobby Bayreuth thing,' he said. 'It will mobilize and support the indigenous cultural energies.'

The Berlin arts figure devised the project after an operation two years ago to save him from lung cancer and writing a book about his brush with death. Francis Kere, a Burkinabe-born architect who lives in Berlin, designed the building. Schlingensief obtained the funding from the Goethe Institute, Germany's cultural outreach agency, and from the government-funded Federal Foundation for Culture. They are to send executives to join Burkinabe ministers at the VIP opening ceremony.

Source: dpa, 31 January 2010

The secret is out. For a long time, Christoph Schlingensief kept quiet about where he plans to build a festival house in Africa, but now the decision has been made. His dream – with the support of the Goethe-Institut – will come true near Ouagadougou.

The happy news arrived at the end of the year: the cornerstone for the opera house will be laid in January. During the summer, Schlingensief already hinted that the capital city of Burkina Faso was his favourite, but the final decision took a while. The project almost seemed to have been given up, so the interest is all the greater now. On Friday, when the decision was made known, there was , a lengthy report on Tagesthemen and on ZDF’s Nachtstudio the artist reported in detail about the project and his decision. He was also able to fill the entire feuilleton section of this week’s Zeit with articles about Africa.

On Monday, 13 containers were sent on their way from the Ruhrtriennale to set up the first building for the “opera village” about 45 minutes from West African Ouagadougou. “We call the project Learning from Africa. It won’t be anything like Bayreuth, but instead is intended to support the local cultural strengths.”

The contracts for the project have already been signed and sealed. Schlingensief and the cultural minister of Burkina Faso signed an agreement whereby five hectares of land are being made available to him for the festival house.

Schlingensief can count on plenty of support for the ambitious project. According to the artist, German president Horst Köhler himself asked the president of Burkina Faso for help. The Goethe-Institut and the Bundeskulturstiftung are also on Schlingensief’s side. Celebrities such as the writer Henning Mankell, pop musician Herbert Grönemeyer and film director Roland Emmerich are each donating 100,000 euros.

The complex will encompass and theatre, a school for 500 students aged five to 17, a guest house, workshops, an infirmary as well as wells and solar collectors.

If everything goes as scheduled, the theatre can already be opened in March. Schlingensief wishes to premiere his own theatrical production in Burkina Faso at the start and then tour with it through Europe. “I will not exploit the African city to do my own thing there,” the German press agency quotes the 49-year-old director as saying. “We do not intend to transplant our culture, but to reveal the creative forces that are at home there, from which we can profit and learn a great deal.”
 
© Goethe-Institut, 22 December 2009

Christoph Schlingensief designs the feuilleton for the christmas edition of the german newspaper "Die Zeit" around the Opera Village and Burkina Faso. He created 6 audio pieces on as well.

Below you will find the complete feuilleton (in German) as well as the 6 audio pieces!

An english translation of the article written by Francis Kéré can be found here.

Click here to download:

2009-12-22_ZEIT_Feuilleton_150dpi.pdf (21.47 MB)