Wolfram Mehring

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Wolfram Mehring (2015)

Wolfram Mehring (* 1930 in Münster ) is a German actor , director and author . Even before Jerzy Grotowski and long before Peter Brook , he devoted himself to the work of actors outside of drama schools.

Life

Mehring trained as an actor while still at high school. In 1954 he moved to Paris and initially studied philosophy and literature at the Sorbonne , later acting with Étienne Decroux , when, disappointed, he turned away from literary spoken theater and turned to work on direct physical expression. At the Maison des Lettres , he founded the Théâtre Franco-Allemand together with Claude Gelin and Grillon (i.e. Janine Grillon ), which from 1958 onwards developed into the Théâtre de la Mandragore . This free group, founded as a Franco-German avant-garde troupe, initially performed with Leonce and Lena in German and French (at a time when the German occupation was not yet forgotten, an additional political issue) in front of a student audience at the Maison de l'Allemagne ( Heinrich- Heine-Haus ) of the international Parisian student development Cité Universitaire . However, members from other European, North African and Latin American nations soon joined the group.

Within this group there was an experimental theater studio under the name "Center franco-allemand de Recherche théâtrale", later "Center International de Recherches scéniques", which was dedicated to working on the "total actor". From 1963 the center moved into rooms in the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier , which Mehring also took over as artistic director in 1966 when the Théâtre de la Mandragore moved there. He has also presented his productions at the Théâtre de Lutèce , the Théâtre Moderne des Théâtre de Paris , the Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui, the Théâtre de la Gaieté Montparnasse and the Théâtre national de Chaillot, and early on on guest tours through Europe, Asia and North Africa. In addition, productions and reports about him and his work were broadcast on German and French radio and television.

From around 1970 onwards it increasingly became guest productions, which later also included various operas such as Aida and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and classical works by Georg Büchner , whom he repeatedly picks up on, William Shakespeare , Plautus, etc., to further Europe, to Africa , South America and the Far East. He worked on several productions per year.

On request, he and the Théâtre de la Mandragore made tours around the world, organized courses in theater and bodywork and founded offshoots of these in various cities that continue to exist independently with the same goals. From 1999 to 2002 Mehring was the opera director at the Staatstheater Kassel . He also wrote his own plays as well as books and articles about his theater work.

Services

For Mehring, the European theater is essentially a literary, an intellectual one: “The text is the goal and starting point of the scenic work.” Even his move to Paris was a reaction “to the German theater of the 1950s, to its urban theater structure and its (un) artistic tendency to illustrate literature instead of creating a theatrical work of art for the eyes and ears. ”For him, theater can work without costume, props, author etc. and even without a director, but never without an actor. And this is “punched” as part of his training to become an actor and has “been brought up to convey a literature.” Before Grotowski and Brook, he went in search of “identity, the laws of acting expression” with the postulate to create a visual theater that "dramaturgically and theatrically ... must be understood by audiences of all cultures".

Especially in the context of his seminars, but also during his productions, Mehring seeks the actor, who is always at the center of his work, to make himself aware of himself again. He tries to find back to the origin of the sensations and feelings through improvisations and to explore the relationship between body, voice and space. He relies on the changeability of the performer, who sets out in search of his identity: not his personal and also not the cultural one, "but the identity of the human being."

Productions

Filmography

  • 1963 Filming of La Marmite by Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (awarded 1st prize for the best production of the last 12 months at the French TV Festival in Boulogne-sur-Mer ) (TV)
  • 1964 Police officer in Komödie der Irrungen (based on Menaechmi von Plautus), directed by Hans Dieter Schwarze (TV)
  • 1969 TV production of America Hurray at the Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt by the Hessischer Rundfunk (TV)
  • 1972 TV production of history for 24 hours by the Second German Television , produced by Bavaria Film (TV)

Works

About the theater

  • "Masques Brulés, Aphorismes", Editions du Felin / Rancilio, Paris 1983, ISBN 2-86645-010-8
  • “The possibilities of an independent, creative actor in European theater,” Lecture on the occasion of a theater seminar at the Schouwburg Rotterdam on September 15, 1976, Paris undated, and as a supplement to the program of the performances of Was ihr wollt and Danton's death in Nuremberg
  • "Body language as transcultural expression language" in the magazine for cultural exchange No. 4, Institute for Foreign Relations - Theater and Foreign Cultural Policy, 1978
  • “The theater has lost the connection from head to body and to the ground” in Die Deutsche Bühne No. 10, October 1980
  • “The marketing of the spirit - Theater today” in the journal - Journal for Aesthetics No. 5, Fall 1988, ISSN  0931-3141
  • “Theater reception in France and Germany” in Geist / Esprit, Piper Verlag, Munich and Zurich 1989
  • “Parisian productions” in coinage - Germans in Paris, Bollmann Library, Düsseldorf 1991

Dramas

  • A crane in the snow (according to an old Japanese legend)
  • Fire dance (an Indian tale)
  • Aymineh the shepherd girl (based on an old Anatolian tale)
  • The gypsy wagon
  • Cats paradise
  • The Snow Queen (based on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen)
  • Büchner's death
  • Reineke Fuchs (based on the epic poem by Goethe)
  • The hangover (after Ludwig Tieck)

(all: S. Fischer Verlag Theater and Media, Frankfurt am Main)

literature

  • Thérèse Le Prat: Un seul Visage en ses Metamorphoses (Le visage: W. Mehring), Librairie Plon, Paris 1964 (photos by the famous theater photographer in which Mehring "animated" made-up masks by Grillon ; the exhibition on this was also in the Musée du Louvre shown)

Web links

There are also various other websites, mostly the official websites of the theaters and opera houses on which Mehring worked, on which details about his productions are listed.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See also the web links at http://manituh2.tripod.com/biography.htm and coins - Germans in Paris,
  2. ↑ This is where the German actor and director Jürgen Schwalbe began his career.
  3. ↑ As before
  4. ^ For example, Georg Büchner ( Büchner's Die ) in Radiodiffusion Télévision Française / France Culture on November 2, 1963 with Roger Blin , Sylvia Montfort , Philippe Noiret and others. a .; Extracts from the production repertoire by Radio Bremen in October / November 1963; Interview in Radio 3, Paris, May 13, 1986; “Portrait Mehring” by Jochen Wolff on Hessischer Rundfunk / hr2 on January 28, 2003
  5. ↑ Interview in Paris Théâtre, No. 255/256, translated by André Denis
  6. ↑ Interview with Dr. Andreas Wirth from the Nuremberg State Theater
  7. ↑ Mehring: “The possibilities of an independent, creative actor in European theater,” Lecture on the occasion of a theater seminar at the Schouwburg Rotterdam on September 15, 1976
  8. ↑ Mehring: "The theater has lost the connection from head to body and to the ground" in Die Deutsche Bühne No. 10, October 1980
  9. ↑ Interview with Dr. Wirth, as above
  10. ↑ Paris Théâtre, as above; see also Mehring: "Body language as transcultural expression language" in the magazine for cultural exchange no. 4, Institute for Foreign Relations - Theater and Foreign Cultural Policy, 1978
  11. ↑ Mehring: "The theater has lost the connection from head to body and to the ground" in Die Deutsche Bühne No. 10, October 1980
  12. ↑ List up to here taken from the information material of the Center International de Recherches Théâtrales / Center International de Recherches scéniques and based on information from Wolfram Mehring.
  13. ↑ See the corresponding website of the Münster Municipal Theaters ( Memento of the original from March 15, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been 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 / www5.stadt-muenster.de
  14. ↑ See the corresponding website of the National Opera of Korea  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.nationalopera.org  
  15. ↑ See the corresponding website of the Städtische Bühnen Münster  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www5.stadt-muenster.de  
  16. ↑ See the corresponding website of the Stadttheater Konstanz ( memento of the original from March 23, 2010 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.theaterkonstanz.de
  17. ↑ See the corresponding website of the Biel-Solothurn City Theater
  18. ↑ See the corresponding website of the Stadttheater Konstanz
  19. ↑ See the corresponding website of the Théâtre National du Luxembourg
  20. ↑ See the corresponding website of the Stadttheater Konstanz
  21. ↑ See article in the Stuttgarter Zeitung (inspection date: April 7, 2017)
  22. ↑ See the corresponding website of the Stadttheater Konstanz (date of inspection July 14, 2018)
personal data
SURNAME Mehring, Wolfram
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor, director and author
DATE OF BIRTH 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Muenster