I began to explore the Kagel universe in 1994 when I got in touch with him to invite him to participate in “L’Arte dell’Ascolto”, the festival dedicated to radio that took place during the nineties in Rimini. That year I wanted to dedicate the “Audioritratto” to him by presenting his radio works, most of which were created for the WDR at the invitation of Klaus Schöning.
Repertorie bears the subtitle “For at least five actors or instrumentalists”. This “open” work consists of a catalog score of 100 individual actions that can not only be recombined at the discretion of the staging, but also be selected and sometimes performed simultaneously. Faced with this freedom of execution, the director works to connect all the elements of the work. From the set designed on panels, the materials that generate the costumes, the lights, the movements on stage, some of the sound objects and the musical instruments used unfold. It is in this way that a red sign, a line, extends into space through light. Everything is separate, everything is together. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet that appear among the drawings are a subtle reminder of his origins (he was born in Buenos Aires into an Ashkenazi Jewish family that fled Russia in the 1920s).
My intention is to create a rhizomatic field to a “repertoire” made of an infinite and surprising series of visual and sound objects and actions. A gesamtkunstwerk. Would Kagel have liked this word? but yes, after all he had just decided to settle in 1957 in Cologne where he found fertile ground to realize his works.
In designing the dramaturgy, I could not help but think of his biography. A young Porteña and his condition of double exile: European Jew in Buenos Aires and Argentinean in Cologne. A permanent refugee, a refugee of thought certainly, his multiple identities fascinate me. His rejection of a single identity is an act of resistance and the characters on stage in Repertoire “deterritorialize” and go beyond the gender paradigm.
Kagel is kaleidoscopic. He grew up in the cosmopolitan avant-garde – influenced by the Bauhaus – of Buenos Aires in the 1950s, he was a film restorer and co-founder of the Cinemateca Argentina, a member of the post-war European avant-garde that fused serialism with aleatory techniques and live electronics, experimenter who with his Fluxus-inspired compositions questions the limits not only of music and composition but of what can be considered art, author of experimental theater, film and multimedia works for which the term composition is not strictly connected to the acoustic territory and is more related to process rather than product.
As often happens in the lives of artists, Kagel’s late works are increasingly connected to his beginnings. It is in this way that the relationship with the aesthetic currents of the fifties in Buenos Aires intensely resurfaces, in particular the link with his teacher Jorge Luis Borges – also partly Jewish and with whom he studied at the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores – and with Witold Gombrowicz.
I like to think of a performance as a deeply interconnected organism. All the elements contribute to the final result and working on an author like Kagel only emphasizes this need for equal “co-presences” between image, sound, space, bodies, actions and so on. In short: Theatre.