Lukas Bärfuss goes on a journey with the musician Gwendolyn Masin
Published: Tuesday, Oct 31st 2023, 06:50
Aktualisiert am: Mittwoch, 1. November 2023, 00:55
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With the performance "The Journey," author Lukas Bärfuss and violinist Gwendolyn Masin take us on an artistic journey from Budapest to Istanbul. It is a long-planned project that, as Bärfuss says, was given a lot of explosive power by the wars and crises.
"The Journey" wants to use texts and music to tell stories of people in migration, in wars and conflict situations, as it says in the description of the project. In view of the flare-up of crises and wars, it is not an easy task that Lukas Bärfuss and Gwendolyn Masin, together with the musicians of the Origin Ensemble, have set themselves.
"The world situation presents us with a mixed situation that exposes our project to a high degree of topical pressure," says Bärfuss in an interview with Keystone-SDA. When the project was in the starting blocks, Corona burst in, he says. And when he resumed work on the project together with Masin, the invasion of Russian troops into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, once again called everything into question.
"Our journey is not complete"
And now, after the terrorist act of Hamas in Israel, everything is more or less out of joint again. "We all don't know what will be on Wednesday, when we will premiere our project," says Bärfuss.
But it is the privilege of art, he said, that it has the tools to respond to such situations. "Our journey is not complete. Nothing is complete, everything is in an evolution," he says. Music and literature his open processes. "That's what we want to invite."
And nothing changes at the meta-level of the project, the migration of people. "It is a constant of history that people migrate, that they are on the move - for very different reasons, voluntarily and involuntarily," says Bärfuss.
A nomad and an emigrant
Bärfuss, an author and playwright from Thun who lives mostly in Zurich, sees himself as a nomad. "I never really settled down," he says, "not physically and not mentally either." In his youth, he lived for a long time without a fixed abode.
And his musical stage partner Gwendolyn Masin also has her own personal migration story, which for various reasons led and drove her from Hungary to Holland and via Ireland to South Africa and then to Switzerland.
Migration als intimes Thema
"Migration is an intimate subject for both of us," says Bärfuss. His own experiences could create a closeness. "But I will never appropriate the experience of refugees from Ukraine, I can only report from my own experience, reproduce what I have read and what has shaped me, what I have absorbed in conversations in Minsk, Odessa, Istanbul and Sarajevo."
In these conversations, he said, he heard stories of people who had had to leave their homes, of the borders they had had to cross, of the misery, but also of the happiness, they had encountered on their journeys.
"It's about the defensive attitude of the bourgeois, settled society toward the migrants, the travelers, the refugees," Bärfuss says. People would never accept that they are without a chance. "They will always take the risk of going on the journey to start a new life elsewhere."
Bärfuss sees himself in the role of the rhapsodist, the wandering storyteller. In "The Journey", the music is now added with a premiere of a work by the Lausanne composer Antoine Auberson, further contemporary works by Daniel Schnyder or Oleg Ponomarev, but also older compositions by Béla Bartók. Violinist Gwendolyn Masin will be accompanied by the Origin Ensemble and cimbalist Milkós Lukács.
For Bärfuss, direct interaction with music is new territory. "It's overwhelming how the power of the music carries you along," he says. Working with these world-class musicians, he says, is a gift and a task. "I hope I don't fall off too much in my role on stage," Bärfuss says.
"The Journey" will premiere Wednesday at the Gare du Nord in Basel and then travel on to Thun, Bern, Zurich, Baden and Schaan in Liechtenstein during November.
©Keystone/SDA
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