Josef Szeiler

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Josef Szeiler (born August 7, 1948 in Sankt Michael im Burgenland ) is an Austrian theater director . As a co-founder of the theater group TheaterAngelusNovus , he is best known for his experimental approach to texts by Heiner Müller , Bertolt Brecht , Homer and ancient dramas.

Overview

Josef Szeiler was born in Sankt Michael in Burgenland. At the end of the 1970s he was an intern for Benno Besson at the Volksbühne Berlin , where he met the playwright Heiner Müller , from which a close personal friendship and long collaboration developed.

Josef Szeiler's first independent theater work in Vienna was based on Heiner Müller's text Die Schlacht . From this work the foundation of the group TheaterAngelusNovus developed, which understood their theater work primarily as a continuous process of self-understanding based on theatrical questions and not in the creation of theater productions that are presented to an audience as finished in a conventional setting. Nevertheless, there were also regularly publicly accessible projects, such as HomerLesen, which took place in 1986 in the Künstlerhaus Vienna , in which the Iliad was read in its full length in parallel both in German by members of the group and visitors and in the original Greek.

After the group was dissolved in 1988, Josef Szeiler headed various projects such as “FatzerMaterial. From theater is therefore to say what one says of the body “in collaboration with Monika Meister at the Institute for Theater Studies at the University of Vienna , which focused on questions of theatrical documentation, or HamletMaschine.TokioMaterial, a parallel production of Heiner Müller's Hamletmaschine to a Japanese production from Shakespeare's Hamlet in Tokyo. In 1995 he staged Heiner Müller's Philoktet for the Berliner Ensemble, "the last theater work that Heiner Müller sees".

In 1998 Szeiler co-founded the group Theaterkombinat Wien , which produced, among other things, MassakerMykene in 1999-2000 at the Sankt Marx slaughterhouse in Vienna.

In 2007 Josef Szeiler and the group "Configuration - Beyond Death", founded in the previous year, produced a theatrical work in the Viennese City of Children, which was based on all of Heiner Müller's ancient texts, but as a sub-project of a complete elaboration of all of Heiner Müller's texts, which was planned for 1996 did not come about due to the death of the author.

Post-dramatic theater

An essential starting point of Josef Szeiler is the principle of dealing with time under the premise that the usual rhythm of theatrical productions (2-3 months of development, two-hour evening performances) serves more to confirm social conditions than to raise questions. In addition, work on the abolition of the separation between audience and actors are characterized as a logical continuation of the lesson approach by Bertolt Brecht . Although pedagogical aspects are reflected, Szeiler's work (in contrast to the work of Augusto Boal or Reiner Steinweg, for example ) is largely characterized by an aesthetic claim in which architecture and the examination of the human body and the theatrical space play an essential role. Production facilities were, for example, a repair hall for the Austrian Federal Railways or the St. Marx slaughterhouse in Vienna.

The German theater scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann identified the work of TheaterAngelusNovus and Josef Szeiler as one of the essential examples of post-dramatic theater , in which the focus is no longer on the presentation of the dramatic text but on self-reflection of the medium of theater. Other examples of post-dramatic theater include Robert Wilson , Jan Fabre , Robert Lepage , Frank Castorf , La Fura dels Baus and the Wiener Aktionisten .

Theater as the art of the social

Another essential starting point of Josef Szeiler is the development of the theatrical choir , derived from antiquity. In contrast to the musical choir, which is held together by music and usually a central conductor, the choir is seen here as a homogeneous organism which, in response to the current situation, always finds its position anew. In contrast to the conducted choir, this requires the ability of the choir leaders to synchronize themselves with the group and to find the best possible individual position or movement. The approach in concrete productions was compared with that of football players who practice lineups and movement sequences in training, which then have to be found anew in the match and adapted to the current situation.

Work

  • Heiner Müller, The Battle

With TheaterAngelusNovus (1981 - 1988)

  • Samuel Beckett, endgame
  • Heiner Müller, Hamlet machine
  • Aeschylus, Prometheus (1983)
  • Bertolt Brecht, FatzerMaterial - Fragment (1985)
  • 3-year project ORESTIE (1986-1988):
    • Part 1 - Reading Homer
    • Part 2 - Death of Hector
    • Part 3 - Vienna / Moscow / Chabarowsk / Moscow / Vienna (theater work on the Trans-Siberian Railway )

Without a continuous group

  • FatzerMaterial –Theatre / documentation work at the Institute for Theater Studies at the University of Vienna (1988/89).
  • Human material 1. The measure. Theater work at the Berlin Academy of the Arts (1990).
  • Heiner Müller: Hamlet machine. Theater work by Josef Szeiler in Tokyo (1992).
  • Heiner Müller: Philoktet (Berliner Ensemble 1995).

With Theaterkombinat Vienna

  • Mykene Massacre (1999-2000)

With Beyond Death configuration

  • Beyond Death - hm3 (2007)

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Szeiler, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian theater director
DATE OF BIRTH August 7, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint Michael in Burgenland