“When the time comes,” is the name of Jacqueline Kornmüller and Peter Wolf's group, and the group name has seldom been more appropriate than in the current culture lockdown. “A year ago there was an incredible amount going on here. And overnight everything collapsed,” remembers Kornmüller in an interview with APA. Two large projects in Vienna and St. Petersburg had to be postponed. Now one hopes for a restart at least on May 1st.
Image: APA
With their literary and musical performance of the picture gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien (KHM), named after the Correggio painting “Abduction of Ganymede”, the group achieved European renown. After guest appearances in Wroclaw, Budapest and Brussels, the seventh edition of the traveling theater premiered on March 4, 2020 at the KHM under the title “Ganymed in Power”. Then came the lockdown. It remained the only and last performance so far. “At that point in time we had already sold 6,200 tickets for the 15 planned performances,” says the director. The performances have already had to be postponed twice. The amazing thing: only 320 buyers had the ticket price refunded. The rest hopes and endures. The time “when the time comes”.
Now it should be ready on May 1st. The list of rebooked replacement appointments reads complicated. Further performances were postponed to autumn. And in the event that new restrictions should restrict the number of admitted visitors, it is hoped to be able to make use of the new “organizer protection umbrella”. After all, fees were paid around 8,000 euros per evening. During the lockdown, the group received support from the NPO fund. “The submissions are a science in themselves. We would never have been able to do it on our own. Fortunately we have a great tax advisor. We also tried to disseminate our experiences via a network”, says Jacqueline Kornmüller, who is responsible for the situation of female artists and artists who take part in “Ganymed in Power” locates major differences. The freelancers were hit hardest. “Perhaps that could be an occasion to think about a basic income for artists in order to prevent these people from ending up in the precariat again and again.”
Kornmüller himself received a 3,000 euro grant from the City of Vienna (“A great thing!”) And for it dramatized the story “The uncanny library” by Haruki Murakami. “The story seems like a paraphrase of the lockdown: a child gets lost in a library and only finds out when he overcomes his fear.” In a few detours she got in direct contact with the author, who gave her the performance rights. Now she is planning a world premiere at the most suitable place imaginable: in the State Hall of the Austrian National Library.
But first it goes to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. When nothing was going on in Vienna, a Ganymede-like project with texts by Russian and Austrian authors had been prepared, which was entitled “Flora”. “Four weeks before the premiere, we had to stop there after a corona case in the museum team.” The Russian prevention concepts put more emphasis on wearing masks in everyday life and on temperature measurements, says Kornmüller, who now hopes to have the premiere in the huge museum (“Everything is eight times as big as in the KHM. The preparation time is incredibly long.”) To take place in September can.
However, simply waiting until “the time has come” is not enough, says the director. You have to push for visibility. Art and culture finally made it possible for society to “think away from itself”: “If the public space for it disappears, society ends up in psychiatry! If the soul is not ventilated, it looks dark.” That is why one should not accept the fact that Austria is reducing itself to a skiing nation and simply giving up the terrain of the cultural nation. “We have to take place! Otherwise society will only get sick more.”
But Jacqueline Kornmüller is certain that the hunger for art and culture will noticeably increase. “I refuse to be pessimistic. Shakespeare started his career in the year of the plague.”
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