Interview: SAVIER KLARO
IMR: What does the phrase Savier Klaro mean? [perhaps it means ‘Clear Knowledge’?]
SK: The name SAVIER KLARO has really no deeper meaning. In our first production in 1989, in Gießen (Germany), we worked with coincidence operations. SAVIER KLARO is a product of such an operation. What lies behind it isn’t divulged, but it is really completely simple. For us, it is important that the name keeps its independence – that’s to say as an artistic pseudonym.
IMR: How many people are in your group?
SK: SAVIER KLARO is Sabine Felker and Jürgen Waldmann. We are supported technically – also and especially in what concerns technical development - by Steffen Seeber. He’s been with us since the beginning. On the dramaturgical side, since 1994 from Raimund Ziemer. The SAVIER KLARO Performance-Ensemble, the name by which we perform our larger productions, has different members, with which some of whom we have worked for a long time. The size of the Ensemble varies between 5 and 10 persons.
IMR: How has Savier Klaro developed to do theater/performance the way you do, instead of traditional theater? Who has influenced you, and why do you do theater in this way?
SK: Naturally, our studies of ‘Drama, Theater, Media’ in Gießen, have influenced us. At that time we went intensively into contemporary Performance/Theater, but also into Fine Art, Music and Philosophy. One can name many artists and groups that have, maybe not directly influenced, but rather impressed, us. Here are some examples: Theater/Performance: Robert Wilson, The Wooster Group; Music: John Cage, Steve Reich, Edgard Varèse and cross-over artists like John Zorn and Heiner Goebbels; Fine Art: Marcel Duchamp, Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola and on the philosophical side especially Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Vilém Flusser.
We have oriented ourselves less by performance with European features, than interested ourselves in a form of European directing. That’s what connects us to theater. However, we confront, with our equality and autonomy of the different dimensions (image, sound, etc.), the subjugation of these different dimensions, in traditional theater, to the importance of the text. Instead of the representation and illustration of the idea, we value the orientation of the recipient in an idea-field and the Sensation-full-ness of the performance.
We choose this kind of performance because it is our way to go into ”world” with its questions and answers; with the connection between ”world” and art; and with art.
IMR: What IS the purpose of this type of performance?
SK: The purpose is to develop the rules that the art process decides, to generate an idea-network and a reflecting idea and material surface, to which the recipient can orient his or her self. With this we don’t want to tell a story, but instead to make a space in which the recipient can make up their own story. Through the confrontation with our comments and questions a dialog is possible. The artist is not a genius, who thanks to her/his vision can discover the truth, that behind the phenomenon is hidden, rather the one with the atheistic means and in the atheistic system of her/his world – and a sense of art, is put at the publics disposal.
IMR: What do you want/hope for audiences to feel, to gain from the performance?
SK: For the recipient it means that s/he must not perform a police identifications work in such a way that s/he asks her/himself: What does the artist want to say with this? How must I interpret the process, so that I can decipher the secret message of the text and recognize the true, big, meaning?
Rather, s/he enters in a dialog with the installed meaning-landscape and the reference network, that certainly is structured and composed but never is organized from the real center. S/he is the meaning-generating part of the event, and is not someone that one must moralistically educate. We want a largest possible freedom for the recipient and we want to raise questions, and not give answers.
IMR: What do you want to express with the music? Anger, love, sadness, etc?
SK: It isn’t about the expression of feelings. Basically it is dramaturgical music. That means, it is acquired out of the theme, and follows with it its independent gesturing, but integrated – that’s to say in arrangement – in the other levels. Nevertheless is no intellectual listening required, rather the sound sets throughout the atmosphere. Exactly the development of specific sounds allows the listener direct access. The music has developed in the last performances from a rather scenery music to a polyphonic sound. It puts on as a kind of patchwork styled, varied music the structure and the collaboration of the elements. As far as that goes, it is composition.
IMR: Is this type of theater deeply satisfying to you, or is it just a game?
SK: SAVIER KLARO is not a game, rather a labor, that satisfies us, and always places in front of us new tasks, and also difficulties. It is the way of making art, in which we can express ourselves. We are naturally net yet completely satisfied with certain passages and sections, and want to work more on them. We want to radicalize viewpoints and integrate other means of approaching things. The question asks itself, if we, in this way, can do any further work at all. The present cultural political situation with its reductions in state budgets and the difficulties to find sponsors for experimental art, make it almost impossible.
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