This year’s Brighton Festival has a German theme & child-appeal

The latest in a line of guest
directors that has included Brian Eno, Anish Kapoor and Aung San
Suu Kyi, the former Children’s Laureate has – perhaps
unsurprisingly – chosen to place a children’s book at the heart
of this year’s Festival: Erich Kästner’s Berlin-based thriller
Emil
and the Detectives.
Published in 1929, the book provides the jumping-off point for an
exploration of the work of German artists of the inter-war period.

Rosen,
speaking at the Festival launch alongside chair Polly Toynbee and
chief executive Andrew Comben, explained that many of this year’s
events would be looking back on the Weimar Republic, the “time of
great hope” which immediately preceded the Third Reich. Such events
include Musik
Kabarett,
a celebration of Brecht and Weill by Nina Hagen, David
McAlmont and Jamie McDermott, and the showing in four instalments
of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Weimar-set television serial
Berlin
Alexanderplatz.

The
post-Weimar era has inevitably cast a long shadow, but, in Rosen’s
view: “We do Germany a disservice by simply seeing it through the
prism of Nazism… Germany existed for hundreds of years before the
Holocaust. It has existed since
the Holocaust. Germany should not be defined by it. … I’m not
German, I have no German background at all – all my forebears were
Polish or Romanian – but there are many aspects of German culture
that I love, there are many aspects of German culture that we
all
love, it informs our lives in many ways. …

“All
art is inter-cultural. We quite often make the mistake of talking
about Shakespeare as a great English playwright; well, for
instance, you can’t think of Shakespeare as separate from Italian
culture; Italianisms run through his plays – like Brighton rock.
Inter-culturalism is important, and making those inter-culturalisms
specific is one of the jobs which a festival can do.”

The
poet’s input on the 2013 programme will be evident in three strands
of activity. “Sense and Non-sense” events will investigate how
words are used, with reinterpretations of classic texts like
Beowulf
and The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
while the German term “Vergiss Mein Nicht” (forget me not)
will inspire events around the theme of memory and its loss – as
for instance in The
Disappearances Project,
where the Sydney-based company version 1.0 will explore the effects
of long-term missing-persons cases on individuals, families and
communities.

And
then there’s “Emil’s World”. As well as inspiring the various
Weimar-themed events, Emil
and the Detectives
will be the subject of a Young City Reads project, in which citizens
young and old will be encouraged to read and discuss the book.
Telling of a young boy’s adventures and misadventures in Berlin as
he seeks to recover some stolen money, Kästner’s classic tale is
described by Rosen as an “incredible pioneering book”, not least
for its thrillingly realistic descriptions of Berlin at a time when
most children’s books were set in sanitised fantasylands.

Comben
identified some of the other potential highlights of this year’s
programme, including Zero,
a dance piece by the Clod Ensemble which “was inspired by King
Lear
but branches out in all sorts of other directions, including
ruminations on the natural world and disasters”; the UK premiere of
Lola Arias‘ My
Life After,
in which a company of Argentinian actors born in the 70s and 80s will
use old clothes, letters and photographs to recreate scenes from
their parents’ lives; and, to mark the centenary of Benjamin
Britten, a staging of The
Canticles
at the Theatre Royal Brighton, under the direction of Neil
Bartlett.

Rosen
himself will take a central part in The
Great Enormo – A Kerfuffle in B Flat for Orchestra, Wasps and
Soprano,
created in collaboration with conductor/composer James Morgan and
singer/composer Juliette Pochin. As Rosen explained: “James and
Juliette approached me, pointing out that it’s been some years
since there was a new piece introducing young people to the
orchestra. Britten, of course, created The
Young Person’s Guide
to the Orchestra,
and there was Prokofiev‘s Peter
and the Wolf
– they’re creaking a
little bit.” Hence Enormo
Biggins,
in which the poet/narrator will help the titular character create a
them tune for his time-travelling theme park. He also expects to be
pressed into service playing the gong and vacuum-cleaner.

Rosen’s
influence on the 2013 Brighton Festival extends even to the image
adorning the publicity: a Bauhaus-style hommage
in monochrome featuring two open palms overdubbed by a pair of gaping
eyes. The eyes are clearly Rosen’s, and on closer inspection the
hands too are identifiable as the ones the poet waves about so
enthusiastically when he speaks. The only problem, he says: “is
that I can’t distinguish between the wrinkles under my eyes and the
wrinkles on my hands – are they the same? There’s a whole
anatomical issue there. But no, I absolutely adore surrealism, I
think it’s wonderful; I love the surrealist photography of Man
Ray and that tradition – Raoul Hausmann and others – so for me
to be a surreal photo, believe you me, I kvell
– that’s yiddish for ‘swell with pride’. That picture is a
picture of someone kvelling.”

The Brighton Festival 2013 runs from
4-26 May (www.brightonfestival.org)