The Crooked Tree
There is an ancient Taoist proverb that states: "A crooked tree lives its own life, but a straight tree is turned into timber." I believe one can find truth in that, I at least do. I did not always want to become an artist. My family, children of the former GDR who, to some extent, glorified their lost state, while I stood in the grey shadows of its past, in between its brutalist buildings, did not have the background or the resources to think about art.
The decision to become an artist was not a grand moment or an epiphany. It was a gradual assurance that evolved over time. I wanted to become a biologist at first. I also liked to sing, and I sang well. I loved classical music, I don't know why, and the sound grew louder until it became a choice. Why singing, one may ask? Well, it is an instrument one does not have to afford, and thanks to biology, it resets with the voice change. It evens out at least some socioeconomic backgrounds, because it did not matter so much whether you started at the age of five.
I learned what I had to learn, took the entrance exam for the Universität der Künste in Berlin, and started studying opera there as a countertenor. It was during my studies that I diversified, the crooked tree growing branches, so to say. I ventured into theatre and playwriting, as well as fine art and composition, already working outside the shielded habitat of my university in various artistic fields. A few of my teachers told me to focus on singing only. I always envied the lightness of that advice. I wished I had it too somehow - the lack of pressure that does not force you to diversify, the resources to travel around for artist programs, auditions and so on. But looking back I am indeed happy that I developed competences that reach beyond conventions.
Certain reference points have stayed with me through all of this. Musically, I keep returning to Bach and Buxtehude: Bach's cantatas for their dramaturgical structure, almost like miniature theatre, and Buxtehude's music for the way it develops out of repetition rather than announcement. A sparkling Händel and his operas, and the deep inspiration I can find in Brahms' life and music. In theatre, Milo Rau has shaped how I think about the purpose of art itself, that it should not be understood as entertainment, but as a mandate to confront rather than to please.
Since graduating from the UdK, I have moved between opera, composition, theatre, and visual performance, with each form changing the way I understand my work. I passed through institutions like the Palau de les Arts, the Gulbenkian Foundation, the Biennale di Venezia, the Deutsches Theater and the Gorki Theater in Berlin, the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, the Wiener Festwochen and the Athens Epidaurus Festival, to which I will return in 2027. So far it was a journey that brings me to the current conviction that voice, body, and text belong together—and that art, at its best, creates a space in which people can encounter one another.