"A Little Happiness, A Little Pain"

Created: 05/15/2022 10:33 am

By: Susanne Greiner

With a 'kiss on the hand' on stilts, the Duo Hochformat (Mirjam Kendler and Julia Dietze) welcomed the guests to the opening event of the district culture days in the municipal theatre.

Nani Weixler's "One-World-Flag", which is currently waving in front of the district office as a peace flag, also flutters in a smaller format (top middle) over the municipal theatre.

© Leitenstorfer

Landsberg – A summer full of culture awaits the district.

Especially in the near future: With around 40 events and ten more for young people, the district culture days offer plenty of space to refill the empty culture battery.

The kick-off event on Saturday evening in the Stadttheater offered an extremely varied and coherently organized programme: culture by artists from the district, covering every genre and every preference.

Afterwards there was dancing until late at night - the joy of celebrating together again.

Or as the artistic director of the Annunciata Foresti district culture days puts it: feel the neighbors again.

A successful start: the district culture days in the district of Landsberg

View photo gallery

"Culture in times of crisis - is that allowed?" Foresti asked in her speech.

And confirmed with a resounding "Yes".

Because culture “wants peace and community.

Everything that promotes culture works against the war.” But Foresti also wants to emphasize another aspect: culture is often taken for granted – which doesn't do it justice.

Because "culture deserves distinctive, social attention."

For Foresti, the district is an “enabler” through the “district culture days” format: Artists from the district should be able to show their own work to the outside world through organizational and “advertising” support.

This year under the motto longing, more appropriate than ever.

If the first district culture days started with "home", in 2019 it was about "courage": "Times that we are now longing for, also for courage", district administrator Thomas Eichinger assumed in his speech.

But longing also contains a nuance of happiness, which together with the pain of missing completes this wistful feeling.

The combination of happiness and pain was also evident in the program, which covered almost all areas of art - even the visual.

Nils Hegner from the Beatrix Klein ballet school started things off, floating across the stage in red to piano-cello music, then accompanied by three other ballet students: this year no frills, but impressive modernity.

Xuan Shao presented the third of Franz Liszt's Petrarch sonnets calmly and precisely, without destroying the "particularly passionate search" of these sonnets.

The music teacher has a very direct connection to the district, explained Eichinger: Shao is the wife of the personal district administrator Philippe-Marcel Optenhövel.

vertical art

The topic of inclusion was implemented by “Viva Randphen- gen” in a mythical-visual-artistic project with singer Souhaila Amade – in stark contrast to the classic performance by the duo Franziska Rappay (violin) with Erik Müller (guitar), which presented the dynamics of a dsárdás.

The acrobatics on the floor and on the aerial silks by the sisters Theresa and Simone Schäfer were greeted with particularly great applause from the audience - rightly so, as the two showed perfect body control in an extremely poetic choreography.

Fallwander, consisting of the musicians Theresa Zaremba and Teresa Allgaier, played atmospheric-psychedelic electronic music.

And the Schondorf artist Andreas Kloker crowned the end with one of his "elementary drawings", 'painting' with a wet sponge on a board:

Eichinger moderated quickly with curtain slapstick, the conversions went smoothly, DJ Rupen Gehrke aka Rupido made the foyer tremble under dancing feet.

The opening of the third district culture days was a success.

The events are now starting and we hope for longing and many viewers, participants, connoisseurs who want to and can absorb culture in a compressed way until the beginning of June.

As we now know, you should take advantage of the opportunities.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

The next district culture days, at least, will only be three years from now.