Pictures (c) Thomas George

The artist Christoph Schlingensief, gravely ill with cancer, travels through Africa looking for a place to build his festival theater

BY ANITA BLASBERG

Christoph Schlingensief leans on a clay hut and shuts his eyes. He is in central Burkina Faso in West Africa. A violent rain shower has just cooled the air, but the mud walls of the hut retain the day’s heat.

“It’s wonderful”, says Schlingensief, “the warmth”. His shirt is soaked in sweat. Children play around him while goats wander across the sand. There are no roads leading to this tiny village and it is not often that a white man strays this way. But here he is.

Schlingensief arrived in this no-man’s-land after a four-hour trip in a Chinese minibus from Ouagadougou, the country’s capital. Along the way, he had a few episodes of feeling weak. But now it is evening, and he sits with his entourage in front of the village chief’s hut, eating freshly slaughtered chicken in a darkness lit only by a flashlight. When the chief emerges from his hut to greet the visitor, he hold’s Schlingensief’s hand for a long time.

Speaking in Moré, Burkina Faso’s main language, he asks, “what’s wrong with your friend? Is he unwell?”

Schlingensief’s doctor told him to avoid plane travel and large crowds and not to shake hands, due to the danger of infection. Pneumonia could kill him.

Christoph Schlingensief was born 48 years ago in Oberhausen in Germany’s Ruhr region. He is a theater and opera director, filmmaker and all round event and installation artist. Now, ill with cancer, he sits among huts with straw roofs in a village called Gando. He has lost eight kilos in the last few months. He undertook this trip against the advice of his doctors and indeed, apparently against all reason, something he is known for. In January of last year, doctors diagnosed malignant lung cancer. His left lung and part of his diaphragm were removed immediately. Following that, he underwent chemotherapy. But in the next eight days, he will race around Burkina Faso, where it is 42 degrees in the shade, speaking to children and government ministers. Christoph Schlingensief, terminally ill, wants to build a grand opera house as a legacy to the world.

It might be built here in Gando, where there is no electricity and no lights and where the women grind millet using the force of only their powerful arms. Perhaps this will be the site of his last great production, his last great search. But what is he searching for?

On the second day of his trip, Christoph Schlingensief sits in an office at the Goethe Institute in Ouagadougou with a group of colorfully dressed Africans. A fan hums. Schlingensief is nervous. He does not speak a word of French, yet he needs to explain to them why he has chosen this barren land, of all countries, as the place to build an opera house.

Schlingensief sits at the head of a long table. Next to him is a young interpreter and in front of him sit a woman from the finance ministry, a choreographer, a theater director and a cinema operator. “Christoph Schlingensief is one of the most famous German artists. He has often provoked the bourgeoisie in Germany”, says Peter Stepan, the director of the Goethe Institute office. The Africans applaud and put on their spectacles expectantly. Schlingensief then uses his laptop to play them scenes from his latest stage production. A small man totters across the stage, dressed as the Pope. Schlingensief tells them, “and here we see a rabbit being eaten by worms. From death springs new life”.

Does this sound like the realm of Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo? The Africans concentrate silently. Eighty percent of their compatriots are illiterate and have never heard of opera and this man has a peculiar hairdo. Schlingensief speaks into the silence, mentioning that this play was sold out in Berlin and that he used it to reflect on his cancer and now he has come to learn from the Africans.

It is not as if they were waiting for him. Even in Germany, his plan sounded, somehow, like madness and escapism, like Kinski in Fitzcarraldo. A man battles his way across Africa and builds a grand theater.

“I’m serious”, says Schlingensief. His plan is to bring artists from Africa and Europe together at his opera house. He has won support from German foreign minister Frank Walter Steinmeier and from the Goethe Institute. He also hopes to raise money from private donors to meet the slightly more than one million Euros he will need.

And now he is here in Burkina Faso with a coterie of five to find the right location. He is accompanied by Peter Anders from the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg, Francis Kéré, an architect from Gando who lives in Berlin, Thomas Goerge, Schlingensief’s long-time set designer, his project manager Celina Nicolay and costume designer Aino Laberenz, who has been his girlfriend for the last five years.

Schlingensief’s path to Africa went through his home town, Oberhausen. In the days after his cancer diagnosis, he visited his father’s grave. “There”, he says, “I swore to myself that I would build this opera house. An opera, a clinic, a school”. Something concrete. Something useful. In the days before his operation, Schlingensief wrote his will. His last wish is for the opera to be built. His legacy.

Immediately after he finished chemotherapy, he flew to Cameroon. But he collapsed and could barely leave his hotel. Next, he wants to look around Mozambique and Tanzania. In the morning, he visited some empty lots with a delegation from the Burkina Faso ministry of culture.

After winding up his presentation at the Goethe Institute, Schlingensief is confronted with blank looks. A theater owner finally chimes in, “you are a great man who believes in what he’s doing. But what exactly is your plan?” The cinema operator asks, “in what language would you stage things?” and the lady from the culture ministry asks, “what do you expect of us?” Schlingensief quotes Beuys, saying that the reason’s lie in the future. “We don’t know why we are doing what we do here, but in the future, we will understand it.” The Africans nod politely, perhaps wondering if it is really possible that there is a German without a plan.

A little while later, Schlingensief sits with a beer in the air-conditioned restaurant of the Hotel Independence. He shakes his head at all the questions and skepticism. Almost like in Germany. He felt uncomfortable in the meeting, like a schoolchild called upon to come up with the right answers. And Schlingensief hates right answers. In school, his work was returned with the notation “completely off the subject”. He does not like concrete plans or scripts. Simply start with nothing more than an idea, then expect too much of yourself and everybody else. That is how he has always worked. “You stay alive by seeking out goals that are a little megalomaniacal”, he said years ago in an interview.

When he got the call inviting him to stage Parsifal at Bayreuth, he did not have a clue about opera, but he accepted. When he stood for parliamentary elections in 1998 with his party “Chance 2000″, they had no platform. But after twelve weeks, it had 16000 members.

“You know what?” he calls out to his companions, “we’re cancelling all the yakety-yak stuff”. Instead, he wants to go out the next morning and explore Ouagadougou with Mohammed, the shy translator who studies German. Schlingensief noticed Mohammed’s curiosity on the very first day. “Mohammed is the only one here who talks about normal stuff, isn’t he?” Schlingensief is bored with the usual cultural maneuvering, even here in Africa. The man from the Goethe Institute looks like he suddenly has a toothache. He has already arranged meeting with government officials. But Schlingensief is in his element. He has never enjoyed living up to expectations.

Schlingensief asks about the revolution.

When a terminally ill person withdraws from society, it is usually said they died with dignity. Schlingensief, however, shouts out his pain. In the first year after he was diagnosed, he thumbed his nose at the cancer with three plays and a bestselling book. His book, called “Heaven Can’t Possibly be as Nice as Here” is one long aria of wailing and howling. While in the hospital he dictated his fears into a tape recorder, unfiltered, like a child, and the transcripts ended up in the book.

“Oh, man, it’s all just such shit, such never-ending shit”. It was at the beginning of May that Schlingensief took his spot on a panel at Berlin’s theater festival.

His Church of Angst was the opening piece and he was the star. When he entered the sold-out auditorium, the audience murmured, “he looks bad, look at him. He’s got maybe a year, at most”. They looked at him like an odd animal that shows its gaping wounds. And because those wounds might have been their own, they applauded long and loud, as if they wanted to applaud him back to health.

Suddenly he was embraced from all sides, almost as if people wanted to make dying easier for him. Arts journalists now called his work “mature” or “unsettling”. Those who had dismissed him as a provocateur fell silent. You don’t pass judgment on a dying man.

The next morning in Ouagadougou, Schlingensief sits in the hotel bar and forces himself to eat a pancake with jam. But his stomach rebels. It is that fear again, against which he underwent therapy back home. He constantly listens to his insides, examines his body. His thorax is so hard, his stomach so funny. No appetite.

“Innocence is gone”, he says, “nothing is the way it once was”. Schlingensief is watching German TV’s special day of programming dedicated to death. He wants to sleep all the time – a man who used to survive on four hours of it. One year ago, the radiologist told him that he “shouldn’t make any more long-term plans”. He took incredible offence at that. To be set boundaries at the age of 47, a man whose only previous use for boundaries was to push them beyond the limit. Now, the disease has claimed power. And maybe this trip, this dream of a grand theater, this long-term plan is an attempt to seize back power over his own life. Even if only for one last time.

Outside the window of the hotel, a worker carries a ladder past the pool and tears come to Schlingensief’s eyes. “Look how strong he is”, he says, “and how he’s sweating”. He, too, liked to sweat, to work like a dog and haul things and roar. On stage and in life.

His eyes are dark buttons. He has become thin and aged. What looked, even at age 40, like baby fat in his face, is gone. He still has his lovely, strong laborer’s hands, but the hair on them is growing back only very slowly. The skin on his arms and around his eyes is inflamed. “Everything tastes like cardboard”, he says. That is a side effect of the pills he takes every day. They managed to rid him of the metastases in his remaining lung. Shortly before embarking on this trip, that was confirmed with another MRI. “It’s a miracle, a gift”, Schlingensief says, “a reprieve so that I can see this through”.

The sun is at its zenith over Ouagadougou and Mohammed has shown Schlingensief the presidential palace, an old cinema and a cathedral that the French left half-finished in the red sand. Schlingensief sits in an old Mercedes, with no AC, and peppers Mohammed with questions: “do you have a girlfriend? Where do you live? What do you want to do with your life?” Mohammed is a friendly young man of 22, who tries to answer conscientiously He wears sandals and a worn, pink shirt. Schlingensief wants to know whether Mohammed has ever had malaria and how much rent people pay for a room in Ouagadougou. Mohammed replies that the rent is the same as the beverage bill in the hotel where they just drank cokes.

“What do you think of the hotel?” Schlingensief asks.

“It sucks”, says Mohammed, going on to say that very few people here can afford a visit to the doctor and yet the president is building ostentatious hotels. Schlingensief asks if Mohammed thinks there might be a revolution here soon. And what Mohammed would change if he were president. Schlingensief listens intently to the interpreter and, with each question and answer, the German’s energy seems to mount.

The Mercedes battles its way through caravans of mopeds, over potholed roads and past street hawkers. Begging children thrust their hands through the car windows and each time Schlingensief reaches into his pockets. At the end of the day, they stop among the throngs along the edge of the road so Mohammed can buy a new camping stove. “I could drive around forever!” he shouts, “I definitely still want to see a hospital. And a big market. And a school.” The joke among his entourage is that somebody urgently needs to teach him the French words for “immediately”, “definitely” and “I don’t care”.

Most of his travelling companions have known him for years. All of them turned down other projects to come on this trip with Schlingensief. None of them doubts him. If he does not build it here, then he will build it in Mozambique, Tanzania or somewhere else. But what is driving this man across Africa?

If you ask him that, he squirms. “Maybe I’m here to find out why I’m here”, he says. It’s a typical Schlingensief answer. He does not like to commit himself, to explain. If asked to explain himself, he takes flight. He says nothing, or else he says so much at once that he disappears behind a fog of words.

Schlingensief fears nothing so much as judgments, which may be why he was hesitant about having a journalist along on the trip to Africa. Shortly before his departure from Germany, he wrote an e-mail in which he apologized for changing his mind, but said that he would rather travel alone. “For me, this theater is a big secret. It is secret that needs time and must be kept”, Schlingensief wrote. He said he was no longer as self-confident as he used to be. But then three days later, he agreed to this journalist’s presence.

Christoph Schlingensief, who in earlier days, never shied away from a media circus, now always sits with his back to the wall when he is out in public. He can barely stand to look at himself in the mirror. He did not even show up at the publication event for his own book. He had bouts of fever the night before, a panic attack. And, indeed, the theater forum nachtkritik.de wrote caustically, “holy St. Christoph of the arts section and café society”. The Internet site of the illustrated Gala carries a picture of him in the section “stars and strokes of misfortune”. The man who never protected himself now suddenly needs protection. The man who always held checks and balances in contempt now seeks them.

It was an evening in April and Schlingensief was taking the train from Hamburg to Berlin. He was coming from an appearance with Beckmann. “I need to take a nap”, he said before the boarding, but then he could not stop talking. It was no accident that he started after the train doors were closed and Schlingensief could not run away. He seemed translucent, in turmoil. He was not well.

In a soft voice, he said he had been thinking over what he had done in all his years, “I want to know why I did all that crazy stuff, like a madman; why I dreamed up so much stuff”. Films, art campaigns, talk shows, plays, operas, installations. Higher, further. The Burg Theater, Bayreuth, the Museum of Modern Art.

Since his diagnosis, he has often gone back to look at his campaigns on his own home page.

“What was the core of my work?” What will remain of him, he wonders, who is he? Who was he? It was only other people who knew who he was.

Schlingensief is now looking for meaning, this man who never wanted closure and whose evenings of theater could only be talked about as if they were accidents to which one was witness. He enters the lecture hall with a bottle of beer in hand. He has the feeling, Schlingensief says, that people never really noticed the social consciousness aspect of his work. “I am Christ”, he says, “even if that sounds funny”. If he could not bear an injustice, he crusaded against it with the zeal of a former acolyte. For twelve years, he assisted the priest at the Heart of Jesus Church in Oberhausen. After a performance at Hamburg’s Schauspielhaus theater in 1997, he and his ensemble moved into the homeless shelter across from the theater and let the homeless and the junkies use his megaphone, giving them a voice. In 1998, with his political party Chance 2000, he brought the homeless and all the other overlooked outsiders onto the stage in a circus tent in Berlin. They wore signs around their necks, with capital letters spelling out “Ich”, or “I”. In 1999, he had a shipping container place in front of Vienna’s Opera House with twelve people in it whose applications for asylum in Austria had been rejected. For a week, passersby could choose a foreigner. It was the era of the Big Brother format on TV. The winner got to marry an Austrian woman.

Schlingensief made society’s sore points visible with the unerring aim of a sensitive child that broaches subjects that adults successfully repress.

Shortly before he was diagnosed with cancer, while he was shooting a film in Nepal, Schlingensief met a man whose son had died after an accident because no doctor was available far and wide. The man then built a hospital. “That really made an impression on him”, his girlfriend says, “that’s where the desire comes from to create something that will help people”.

“I look at people longer now. I look into their faces”, Schlingensief said back then on the train. He says he rarely used to do that. “When did I ever worry about anybody else?” he asks, “I never helped anybody move house. Not once”. When his father was dying in 2007, he did not go to Oberhausen, but instead held an actor’s hand on stage. Schlingensief still hates himself for that.

“Maybe I should take a vacation. Mauritius would be great, or Easter Island”. But he did not even manage to stay in his post-operative rehab for the full allotted time. “I long for simple things”, he said. Then he scrolls through the photographs in his cell phone. His primary school. His father’s pharmacy. Himself after the operation, with tubes in his body. Himself in a hotel on the Baltic. “That was when I was thinking of killing myself”, he said, “but after ten days, Aino came to bring me home”. Then pictures of his new apartment in Berlin. The cactus that he nursed back to health. Three times it drooped, but it blossomed for the first time this spring. “Once, I would have found that kitschy. But now a thing like that touches me”, he said. He said he never wants to fall into the blind rut again of “even more and even faster. Instead I want to live a life that has meaning and get closer to people”.

It was already late when all of that poured out of him, unfiltered. Schlingensief thinks as he speaks, not the other way around. One sometimes gets the feeling that silence makes him afraid. Once in the hospital, the nurses forgot to administer his morphine, but he did not feel the pain. He was talking into his tape recorder the whole time.

He lacks the outer protective layer that other people have, yet he remains almost inscrutable. With other people, you try to discover what is behind their silence. With Schlingensief, it is the other way round. He obscures his self with manic disclosure.

There is an expectant silence in the auditorium at Ouagadougou University, as German Studies students squeeze into seats to hear the artist from Germany speak. The hall is full. Only Schlingensief has not yet appeared. “Stage fright”, murmurs his companions. As they are taking bets on whether he will show up, he enters the auditorium with a half-empty bottle of beer in his hand. Schlingensief sat undecided in his hotel room for a long time. He did not want to have to give another presentation as if he were applying for a job. That scares him these days – the idea of having to explain his ideas in front of so many people. “There is no more fearful person than Christoph”, his girlfriend says. Even during the day, she says, he cycles with his bike light on. And years ago, when he was shooting a film in Africa, he used up almost all the anti-malaria pills for the entire crew because he imagined he was getting the disease.

But when he gets behind the lectern and the equipment fails, his mood improves suddenly. “What is theater?” he asks the room, “people standing on stage, afraid of making a mistake!” There is some timid laughter. “And now I’ll tell you why I do theater”, he says, taking a sip of beer. He proceeds to tell the story of his arrest after he had shouted out “kill Helmut Kohl!” on stage. “Back then, they wanted to torture me, cut me up and burn me for three years. But theater saved me. It allows you to do everything you can’t try in real life.”

The translator, a professor of German studies, giggles in embarrassment. And then he falters as Schlingensief starts talking about Jesus and Mohammed. “Mohammed, Jesus and all the spirits we appeal to are one person and that is us ourselves”, he says. The nuns at the back whisper, “grave, c’est grave”, it’s crude, unbelievable. But they remain seated.

Next to them, young Muslims mutter similar sentiments. Schlingensief is on a roll now. He finally gets to the opera idea. “All artistic trends flow together in opera”, he shouts. On the wall behind him is a projection of a building shaped like a snail that he designed with the architect and the set designer. The snail will have various chambers and rooms, Schlingensief says, “all flowing into each other!” A large stage, several rehearsal rooms, a cinema, a prop and costume room, one for overnight visitors and, finally, a small school and an infirmary. The snail can be expanded at will. It can grow. “There should be a hotel, too”, Schlingensief says, “I want a lot of visitors from every continent. The opera house is intended to be a site for exchange and testing, with no up or down”. A kind of research laboratory. And, indeed, he has created labs like that wherever he went – on stage and in circus tents, spontaneously on the street or in the subway. But this lab will outlive him.

Then Schlingensief begins to talk about his illness. He tells them how he takes medications that cost about 1500 Euros per month, every month. A murmur goes through the auditorium. Schlingensief is now speaking so fast that the interpreter can barely keep up. “1500 Euros”, he yells, “you couldn’t afford that. Just to extend my life by a bit”. At the end of his lecture, Schlingensief uses spit to write the name “Beuys” on the blackboard. “Life and art”, he quotes, “belong together!”

The lights come up and the students whisper among themselves. They did not understand everything, but their eyes shine. They say they were impressed by the artist’s energy.

“Could somebody slow him down?” ask his friends.

The next day, Schlingensief is standing in the tumult of Ouagadougou’s main market when one of his aunts calls, Trude from Oberhausen. There is always somebody phoning him up these days. Just to be sure. “Everything’s great here”, Schlingensief yells into the phone, “I can breathe. The others are much more drained than I am. Say hi to everyone, OK?”

It is amazing. His strength is coming back in Africa, of all places, where his life is supposed to be in danger. “I can sleep again”, he says, “I have my appetite back”. It is 42 degrees in the shade and he has been walking around in the heat for hours. In the morning, he went to see a dance school and wove around the dancers with a handheld camera until his shirt was soaked in sweat. The other members of his crew were groaning, “could somebody stop him?” But he has been running around all his life. He fought his way from artwork to artwork as if he were fleeing, through more and more genres, in countries farther and farther away. If he encounters no resistance, he goes looking for it. He managed to last four years in Bayreuth, Schlingensief the free spirit at the bastion of high culture. In the end, all communication was conducted through lawyers.

In one of the last plays he did before the cancer diagnosis, he sat on a stage in Zurich, naked, smeared with chocolate pudding and bellowed about redemption for 90 minutes. And it was in Nepal, a few weeks before the diagnosis, that he wrote in his journal, “hoping that the circling thoughts will find solid ground”.

Schlingensief talks to his mother in Oberhausen on the phone almost every day while he is in Burkina Faso. She had a stroke and is confined to a wheelchair. He is an only child, the son of devout Catholics. They waited nine years for him and christened him Christoph Maria. He was the son who was supposed to be a girl. They wanted six children. He lives so fast that it would suffice for six lives. He always tries to be a good son and make them happy. His father is a pharmacist, his mother a nurse. He went to church, joined the conservative Christian Democratic party and the Lions Club. The church always scared him, Schlingensief says. Even just a few years ago, his parents had a problem if he shared a room with a girlfriend when he was staying with them. He says his parents’ life was all about avoiding mistakes. When his first film, “Menu Total”, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, his father left the theater crying in horror. After that, his father only showed his mother the scenic shots from his other films.

If he got ten good notices and one bad review, he would brood about the bad notice, says Matthias Lilienthal, one of his dramaturges, adding that Schlingensief has often been accused of being adolescent and superficial. In his bad moments, the artist believed it. Even when he was celebrated by the New York Times, Schlingensief remained the insecure boy from Oberhausen who was rejected twice by film school. “Success never reached his conscious awareness”, Lilienthal says.

“Church of Angst is the only play that I have no doubts about”, says Schlingensief one evening in Africa. He worked on it while he was in chemotherapy and it is about his fear of death. It is simple and serious. The play makes one think that the cancer has brought him closer to himself.

In Burkina Faso, he was seen storming out of the hotel again because he had forgotten to tip his driver. He cannot walk past a single beggar without reaching into his pocket for money.

Schlingensief, who says he does not believe there is anything after death, now sometimes seems like a Christ trying to get into heaven. A man who always lived for the provisional is now trying to take stock of his life. His opera house will be built of clay. A social welfare center, a good work. It will stand in Africa, unshakeable. Perhaps it is also meant to be a way of asking indulgence. He still wants to get married and father a child.

In Burkina Faso, Schlingensief spends every free minute reading e-mails on his cell phone. A crew from ZDF German TV wants to come from Nairobi to shoot a report about him. Rupert Neudeck, the founder of the charitable organization Cap Anamur has offered him help building the theater. The jury of the Berlin theater festival did not award a prize for best play, but instead crowned three best actors. “Claus Peymann pushed that through”, Schlingensief says. He says Peymann voted against his play Church of Angst and said it was not theater. Peymann! Schlingensief really wants to be annoyed, but in the end he just shakes his head. “I don’t want to wage war the way I used to”, he wrote in his book, “the fairgrounds will just have to remain shuttered”. He wants to marry his girlfriend this summer. They have taken an apartment together in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district. And he is also thinking about children. The man who always fled from the unequivocal now wants to commit.

The light of day is fading to darkness as Christoph Schlingensief climbs up a large rock hill in the no-man’s-land of Burkina Faso and takes a deep breath. There is nothing but vastness, red earth, trees and silence. The rock hill is next to the miniscule village of Gando where Schlingensief was welcomed by the chief. The chief is the father of Francis Kéré, the architect who is showing the German his home village.

Schlingensief also visited Gando’s cemetery, alone. Here amid the living, the dead are buried. In the center of the village. Schlingensief lies down on one of the warm, flat stones and looks up at the sky, almost fully gripped by dusk, but still showing a tinge of twilight. It is time to leave in a moment of wanting to stay. Schlingensief closes his eyes and falls still. “The warmth of the stone is drawing me in”, he says, “I feel roots here, home”. It seems as if he wants to hold onto this moment and memorize the feeling of having arrived. He cannot shake himself loose until it is full dark.

There is hardly a place on Earth that is less reminiscent of Schlingensief’s roots in Germany than these wide open African expanses. But for the first time on this trip, Schlingensief seems completely centered, completely calm. A man who suddenly, midway through his life, sees death rushing at him. A man who had to travel very far to find himself. A man who has come to the primal continent to deal with primal issues. Who am I? What have I lived for? What still remains to be done? A marriage, a child, a house.

In the face of death, the middle-class son appears from behind the artist. And Christoph Schlingensief allows that to happen, with relief. He had to endure a lot of suffering before he could admit that truism, to others or to himself.

The next day, Schlingensief goes to see Gando’s school. He observes the first grade math lesson, walking along the rows of chairs and watching the children do their sums with chalk on their slates. “What potential”, he will later say, “imagine what it would be like if they all had the chance to do art!”

His opera house is intended to fuse life and art, to be a place of discovery. Schlingensief could have just gone to a bank and set up a foundation. But it has to be a Schlingensief project, a great African effort.

“I hope I’ll be back”, Schlingensief says as he leaves. But he knows that he cannot build an opera house here in Gando. He cannot set down a cultural spaceship in the midst of this virgin landscape. But he could find a spot on the outskirts of Ouagadougou, where poor and rich, city and countryside flow into each other, with all the inherent contradictions. He has already researched how to get a construction permit. “If all goes well”, says Schlingensief, “I have another five years”.

Source: Dossier, June 25, 2009, DIE ZEIT No. 27. Credits: Aino Laberenz.

Download this article as PDF document:

Schlingensief is to head to Africa on May 17 to visit potential locations for his next project: a festival theater for the continent. Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Tanzania are candidates for the endeavor, which has already received official support from German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the Goethe Institute.Africa is, after all, “the cradle of opera” and holds the “roots of music history,” the director has said, adding that he wants to complete the project quickly.

It’s not surprising that Schlingensief is looking to leave a mark. Despite recovering from lung cancer, which was diagnosed in January 2008, the 48-year-old has said he feels he doesn’t have much time left won’t be around much longer.

Time running out

“Deep down inside, I believe that I’ll be on earth for two or three more years. It’s strange, but I sense that,” he wrote in “Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung” (”Diary of cancer”), a personal account of the struggle which was published last month.

He wrote that he doesn’t believe in life after death, so making a difference in this life is all the more important to him.

Schlingensief linked his life-changing illness to his work on a controversial production of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” for the 2004-2007 Bayreuth Festivals.

“I opened a door I never should have opened,” he said.

Though Bayreuth is known to be a pressure-cooker for all the artists involved, it’s also a clear career-booster that Schlingensief has praised on other occasions.

After undergoing several surgeries and 12 weeks of chemotherapy last year, Schlingensief wrote that his body and soul were “put through the wringer” and that, “The cancer is gone, but the incision is still there.”

Staging fear of death

The physical, emotional and spiritual effects of the cancer are dealt with in his most recent play “Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir” (A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within), which incorporates elements of the Catholic liturgy in a multimedia production.

One of the most discussed works of the season, it opened the Berlin Theatertreffen festival on Friday, May 1.

The event showcases the best of German-language theater and attracts a high-brow audience of theater connoisseurs. Only a handful of them joined in the smattering of applause that followed the opening performance of Schlingensief’s work, which had debuted at the Ruhrtriennale theater festival in Duisburg in September 2008.

Maybe it’s simply not appropriate to clap for this kind of show, speculated the online version of the German news magazine Der Spiegel in a review, “It isn’t just conventional theater: it’s more authentic, personal and private.”

The left-leaning Berlin tageszeitung, on the other hand, didn’t mention the near absence of applause, but wrote that “it was the very return of faith in the power of theater which was celebrated with (Schlingensief’s) piece at the opening of the Theatertreffen.”

African pre-premiere in Vienna

Regardless of the amount of audience applause, Schlingensief and his work never fail to spark discussion.

His new life project – the festival theater for Africa – recently made its debut in Vienna. A miniature version of the theater appeared as part of the scenery in his latest production of “Mea Culpa,” which was performed in Vienna’s Burgtheater at the end of March.

As for the real-life version, with deep-pocketed supporters on his side like the foreign minister, Schlingensief may well manage to complete the project before the two-to-three-year deadline he’s given himself.

Deutsche Welle, 06.05.2009, kjb/sms, dpa/AP

Credits: Sibylle Dahrendorf, Bianca Schulze, Meika Dresenkamp