Not rich, but happy
Why does a woman spend all her fortune on a drama? Why is painting a picture that nobody wants to buy and is someone tormenting while writing? And why is it worth fighting for songs that exist only for the moment? The artists involved here have a valid reason for their irrationality: they can not help themselves. They would get a stomach ache, dry up internally, hate themselves if they could not do what they burn for: create a world with other artists or even on their own. Sharpening the senses for reality with words. Escape the pressures of everyday life with a brushstroke. Or be part of a universe with your own voice. Only children and lovers so unconditionally pursue a cause. One thing is certain: without them, the world would be as dull as a stock market table.
Long breath or strangled voice
Marion Martienzen 56, jazz singer
Once she went on stage as a salad. In a poisonous green robe and with a lettuce hat, a few leaves hung in her forehead. And then she sang, powerful and tender at the same time, the old Ray Charles song "It's not easy being green". This humor is typical of the actress and singer Marion Martienzen. She can look stunning with her dark hair and cherry-red lips. Sometimes she throws herself in a glittering fuss as in her performances in the vocal duo "Just the two of us". But she does not really take it seriously. "These are disguises, it's tremendously fun for me to break this absolutely sexy-wanting." Perhaps humor also protects her from being able to compete with her jazz idols. "I've never worked hard for the vocals," she says. To this day she can not read music and does not breathe properly while singing. Sometimes, she says, she has no air left after a line. "Then I have to hold on to something else, otherwise I'll tip over."
She has almost 40 years of stage and voice experience. Her parents were actors, making little Marion speak the voice of girl Scout in "Who's disturbing the nightingale". At 16 then drama school in London, with 20's first involvement in the theater. But her vocal talents have underestimated her for a long time. She was in her early 40s when she got a role at the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, which was to change her life. The play was called "secretaries," and it was only sung in it. There followed more "song recitals". Suddenly Marion Martienzen had fans who only went to the theater to hear their interpretation of Aretha Franklin's "Respect". Would they still come if she would sing jazz classics in German?
For months she had worked on the lyrics. At some point 22 pieces were finished. And then the big record label Universal actually called her. They want to organize a few showcases with her. Can she sing, move, "present" herself? Can she. The clubs were full. But in the end, Universal blew everything off unexpectedly.
Others might give up now. The first album with 56? "Now all the more," says Marion Martienzen. She took a long breath to realize, "It's not about appreciation and money, but about being part of the music I've loved all my life." Even if you sometimes run out of air, singing, she says, is "just happy". You can see that.
Freedom or frustration
Franziska Sperr 60, writer
A nice sentence can make you happy for days. Then she runs trilling through the house on Lake Starnberg. Everything flows, every formulation fits right away. For such days, says Franziska Sperr, the others are worthwhile, these days when you can not succeed. She taps something, puts it out again. So it goes back and forth. "I have to be careful not to reject everything."
And yet she just wanted it that way. Has hanged the secure job as a press spokeswoman in the Munich Cultural Department to start again in the early 50's as a writer. The family could have used their fixed salary well. Son and daughter study in Berlin. And her husband, the philosopher and author Johano Strasser, is also a freelancer. But he said then: "Do that, you'll get a stomachache!"
I can create anything - or nothing
She has since published two books. The narrative volume "Dumb with happiness" (2005) is about mouse-gray men or frustrated wives, all those short-comers of this world, who also want to get a bit of luck. The critics are excited. Still, she has to fight for her next book. Ten publishers reject it. She does not give up. In 2008 her debut novel "Das Revier der Amsel" about two unequal sisters will be released. Crystal clear told, keenly watched, never soulful. "Great art," rejoices a reviewer.
But writing always means both: power and powerlessness."I can create anything - or nothing," says Franziska Sperr. Huge freedom or great frustration - this tension must be sustained. Sometimes, she says, she trembles with excitement when she sits at her laptop in the study. Nobody is more inexorable than the inner critic. She is currently writing a manuscript for a new publisher because of her age-old failure. Again, she has to start from scratch, promoting a literature that does not want to be compliant, but forces you to look where nothing seems to happen: in fitted kitchens, commuter trains, or offices, where her inconspicuous heroes fight valiantly against missed opportunities. Literature that opens your eyes. She knows, she can. On good days anyway.
money or life
Hille Darjes 66, actress
With 50,000 euros you can do a lot. Buy a car, go on holiday for two years or save money for bad times. But Hille Darjes and her husband Chris Alexander have spent everything for an illusion, all their savings for something as fleeting as a theatrical performance. "Shakespeare in Trouble" is the name of her play, which she performed in Berlin as a guest performance. They wrote it, rehearsed and staged it, transported all the equipment, paid all the fees - but not their own. There was nothing left for the director and the actress.
"I think we are courageous and interesting, only a few embark on such an adventure," writes Hille Darjes in a letter. Right. But why? "Because at my age, I do not get any more roles," she says straight out. A gray-haired woman with curious eyes and a defiant mouth. Of course she could stop at the age of 66, her husband earned enough as an opera director for both. But how can that be done when life and work are so closely interlinked? Money has always played a supporting role. She lives with her husband and other families and artists on a thatched-roof farm in Worpswede. Here they also rehearse their plays in a shed. For over 20 years she has been doing free theater. Her last permanent job she quit at 41 to move with her six-year-old son to her husband. Are you crazy? You will never find a commitment again, friends said back then. "It was like that," she says dryly.
So she and her husband founded their own theater in Bremen, the successful Shakespeare Company to this day. At the beginning of the 90s, the founding group broke up. From then on, Hille Darjes wrote her own roles. More than 500 times she performed with her Virginia Woolf monologue "A Room Alone". The fees were correct, she did not have to share with anyone. But she lacked fellowship with others, she says. She wanted to bring the old company colleagues together again. It was to be a historical comedy about your own guild. About fears and vanities of a theater group and getting together in uncertain times. When they were able to perform "Shakespeare in Trouble," she knew what she had been paying for. "The performances were like a week-long party." In the evening they played, then ate and drank together. And Hille Darjes was right in the middle.
"Actors are strange beings," it says once in the play. Why? "Because they take the game so seriously," she says. And how is it going now with their 50,000-euro game? "I'm writing new theaters in other cities," she says. It's all about her life.
Art or kitchen
Julia Rein 43, painter
Between washing machine and dryer the paintings of a half life pile up. Tile-sized canvases, on it: plates, cups, toasters. Or a drying rack with socks, during the day and at night. Julia Rein paints what she immediately surrounds. They are images that seem to beat everyday life, this merciless rhythm of rinsing, cooking, cleaning, cheating, by depriving things of their true purpose. In other pictures she contrasts the domestic world with the great world events. Then she puts Lara Croft, the super heroine of the 90s, in front of a clothesline. Paint dramatic footage she has found in her brother's albums on brightly colored scraps of cloth from her mother's cellar. Or she embroiders the heads of newscasters.
I do the household or art
On a real breakfast board from her kitchen are three painted sausage slices of wood. Title: "Breadless". She means so too to herself. If she is lucky, she sells two pictures a month. More than 400 euros rarely jump out. She leads a modest life - not a car, not a vacation - which also includes a bit of unreasonableness and defiance. With her husband, who is also a freelancer, the 43-year-old is currently receiving her third child. Since she left school just before she graduated from high school, she has gotten on with jobs as a museum supervisor, a card taker, or as a cashier in the Stuttgarter Staatsgalerie. Before she had a family, she painted in her one-bedroom apartment. "The pictures were in the bathroom, the easel next to the bed," she says. Everything smelled of cheap acrylic paint, others she could not afford often. "Once I did not have any money left for colors, so I simply embroidered my pictures." Your everyday life is clearly divided."If I do not have to go to the museum, I do the household or art." Only three steps are between her kitchen and her studio. She has to start the few hours she has there, she says, without "spitting around" for a long time. And if she does not manage to give art its place? "Then I annoy everyone and I'm unhappy." She has to paint. Nobody forces them to do it. Only you. In life, we must constantly obey external constraints, she says. "Art is something you do not need, which is completely useless." When someone buys one of their pictures, she always wonders a bit. And then she is happy.
All or nothing
Gilla Cremer 52, one-woman theater
She stands alone on the stage. Is father, mother, daughter, as in the postwar drama "Father has camp", or child, girl and old woman, as in the Hildegard Knef play "Either way". As a single mother who makes a fatal decision, she is particularly touched by Véronique Olmi's "Maritime Edge". Up to two and a half hours monologue, over 100 pages memorized text. And when the curtain falls, it still goes on. She dismantles the stage, stows the props she has brought with her in her red VW bus and, after a night at the hotel, sets off again for another venue.
Gilla Cremer calls her one-woman mobile company, with whom she has been traveling for over 20 years, "Theater Unikate". And in which she does everything, but really everything alone: researching fabrics, collecting funding, writing pieces, finding venues, printing flyers and posters, promoting viewers, touring from Bad Berleburg to Bünde - forgetting something? Oh yes, she has to play too. And with the same fury in front of 700 people at the Hamburg Thalia Theater as in front of a few dozen spectators on a small provincial stage, where they tear up the tickets if necessary even before the performance.
Is not it easier? Gilla Cremer sits on a bar stool after one of those 16-hour days, tall, blond, beaming, and drinks beer from the bottle. "The solo career came from an emergency," she says. It all started when, as a single mother with two small children, she did not fit into her free theater group anymore. A solid commitment was not in sight. She was never at a classical drama school, her career is idiosyncratic: dance training in New York, mask carving on Bali, study of theater anthropology in Bonn. Here you met the doctrine of the so-called "poor theater". The stage, she says, should be "freed from all the bells and whistles". It was about fantasizing a whole world out of nowhere - today she masters this art perfectly.
She is now 52 years old. Her athletic body tells nothing about it. Maybe she keeps this on-the-road feeling alive. And what she describes as the "therapeutic effect" of her work. "Being able to be anything, Diva, murderer, idiot, living everything out unrestrained, anger, panic, despair, without it having consequences." Liberating that is. And then "this incredible luxury to be able to determine everything". The downside: never be sick. The financial pressure. There were times when her schedule was empty for months. All or nothing - their lives move between these poles.
2009 was a good year. 43 performances from the repertoire of her ten pieces. There are serious, sad, funny stories about German conditions that want to entertain and at the same time shake up. For Gilla Cremer they are their "life capital".
