Ruth Weiss (artist)

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Ruth Weiss (born June 24, 1928 in Berlin ; † July 31, 2020 in Albion , California) was an Austrian-American poet, author, performance artist, playwright, filmmaker and actress. Ruth Weiss is best known for her jazz poetry performances.

Life

Ruth Weiss was born into a Jewish-Austrian family (her parents were Oscar and Fani Weiss) in Berlin. In 1933, while fleeing the Nazis, her parents returned with her to Vienna for the time being , where she experienced the decisive childhood years in the increasingly radical climate of the emerging National Socialism. At the end of 1938 the family was able to emigrate on the last train to Holland and from there to the USA (their relatives who remained in Vienna perished in the Holocaust ), first to New York , then to Chicago , where they settled in 1949 and during a jam session gave her first (private) readings accompanied by jazz music, whereby, as she said in an interview, she prefers bebop for her readings. In 1952 she moved to San Francisco .

Weiss appeared from the mid-1950s in the context of the American " beat poets ". Her jazz text performances became legendary in 1956 on the stage of the club "The Cellar" in North Beach, San Francisco, where Ruth Weiss was the first to combine poetry and jazz. The club was founded by friends of her jazz musicians Sonny Nelson, Jack Minger and Wil Carlton from New Orleans, who accompanied her readings. She was friends with the authors Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady , with whom she exchanged haiku poems.

In the 1960s she appeared in Steven Arnold's films (e.g. in Messages, Messages , which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1969). In 1996 her own film The Brink (1961) was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at the Venice Biennale . A guest at a Beat Generation Festival in Prague in 1998 , she returned to Vienna for the first time in 60 years.

Since then, the artist has returned to Vienna several times: Among other things, she taught at the invitation of Christian Ide Hintze at the poetry school , performed in various jazz clubs as well as in the Radiokulturhaus , the Literaturhaus Wien and the Amerlinghaus in Vienna.

From 2001 onwards she worked closely with zentrumexil, edition exil and theater.exil. In October 2006, a collage of three one-act acts by Ruth Weiss was premiered by roma.theater.exil at dietheater Vienna under the title No Dancing Aloud . In 2000 she performed at the Berlin Jazz Festival . She performs regularly in San Francisco. She traveled regularly to Europe, especially to Vienna, to hold poetry readings, often accompanied by a musician. She lived with the artist Paul Blake, her partner from 1967, for many years in Albion (California), 250 km north of San Francisco ; According to another source, she got to know the small town with only 170 inhabitants today in 1982. Her current partner, Vietnam veteran Hal Davis, who is 20 years her junior, lived there with her.

Prizes and awards

In 2006 she received the Medal of Honor from the Federal Capital Vienna . In 2012 she was awarded the prize "The Most Beautiful Books Austria 2012 in Category I: General Literature" for her book A Parallel Planet of People and Places .

Fonts

  • Steps (1958)
  • Gallery of Women (Adler Press, 1959)
  • South Pacific (1959)
  • Blue in Green (1960)
  • Light and Other Poems (1976)
  • Desert Journal (1977)
  • Single Out (1978)
  • Romeo and Juliet (1982)
  • 13 Haiku (1986)
  • For These Women of the Beat (1997)
  • A New View of Matter / Nový pohled na věc (Mata, Prague 1999)
  • Full Circle (translation: Christian Loidl, edition exil, Vienna 2002)
  • Africa (2003)
  • White is all Colors / White is all colors ( Edition Thanhäuser , Ottensheim 2004)
  • No Dancing Aloud / Loud dancing not allowed (translation: Horst Spandler, edition exil, Vienna 2006), with an essay on Ruth Weiss by Horst Spandler
  • Can't Stop the Beat: The Life and Words of a Beat Poet (2011)
  • A Fool's Journey (2012)
  • One step further to the west is the lake , a selection with poems from 50 years, bilingual English / German, translation: Horst Spandler, Verlag Stadtlichter Presse , Wenzendorf 2012
  • A Parallel Planet of People and Places . Stories and Poems. Contains: "Just keep breathing!" Interview with Ruth Weiss by Alexander Klug. "Ruth Weiss - Beat is a way of life" by Elias Schneitter . Edition BAES, Zirl 2012. ISBN 978-3-9503233-3-7 .
  • The Snake Sez Yesssss / Die Schlange says jetzzzzzt (2013)

as well as further publications in more than 150 anthologies and magazines such as Beatitude .

Discographic notes

  • Poetry and Allthatjazz vol. 1. Live performance with Doug O'Connor (bass), audio and video 1990
  • Poetry and Allthatjazz vol. 2. Live performance with the trio Larry Vuckovich (piano), Omar Clay (drums), Isla Eckinger (bass), audio 1993
  • ruth weiss with Matthias von Hintzenstern: A New View of Matter. Aware House 2000.
  • Jazz & Haiku, Absurdia Records 2018.

Filmography

Documentaries

  • Surprise Voyage (2001), directed by Paul Blake
  • Breaking the Rules: Across American Counterculture (2006), directed by Marco Müller
  • ruth weiss Meets Her Prometheus (2007), directed by Frederick Baker
  • San Francisco's Wild History Groove: Underground Artists and Poets from the California Beat Era (2011), directed by Mary Kerr
  • Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies (2019), directed by Vishnu Dass
  • ruth weiss, the beat goddess (2019), directed by Melody C. Miller
  • One More Step West Is The Sea: ruth weiss (2021), written & directed by Thomas Antonic

Appearances in films

literature

  • Antonic, Thomas. From the Margin of the Margin to the 'Goddess of the Beat Generation': ruth weiss in the Beat Field, or: 'It's Called Marketing, Baby.' In Out of the Shadows: Beat Women Are Not Beaten Women. Ed. by Frida Forsgren and Michael J. Prince. Kristiansand: Portal Books, 2015.
  • Höfer, Hannes. Literature and jazz: For example ruth weiss literaturkritik.de No. 8/2019
  • Knight, Brenda. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution. Berkeley: Conari Press, 1996.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kirk Fox: Ruth Weiss (1928-2020), pioneering female beat poet. In: Legacy.com. August 3, 2020, accessed on August 11, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from September 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sanfranciscoreader.com
  3. ↑ Thomas Antonic: The Voice of Resistance , in: Falter (Wochenzeitung) , No. 34, August 22, 2018, p. 24 ff.
  4. ↑ ruth weiss, the beat goddess. Retrieved on August 14, 2020 .
  5. ↑ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10468276/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2
personal data
SURNAME Weiss, Ruth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American author, performance artist, playwright, filmmaker and actress
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH July 31, 2020
Place of death Albion , California