The 60s are alive and well in Germany. What was billed as a light show on the Marktplatz in Weimar this past weekend came with mountains of technical equipment and molehills of creativity.
When it started at 9 p.m., I couldn’t help thinking how it reminded me of our student composition recitals as an undergraduate. It comprised a grand effort to do everything that could be done. It spared no pretense.
The show began with alphorns on top of the control booth played by people in white sheets and chef hats, performers in windows all around the platz, a center stage with shadow dancing behind white drapes, search lights scanning the area, red lights in a few rooms of the Rathaus, a Männerchor on the Rathaus balcony. A children’s chorus entered purposefully in a long line and headed for the stage by the control booth, taking three steps forward, two steps backward, dip, repeat. People dressed in metallic costumes posed as statues on ladders, moved the ladders and posed again. Neptune stood waist deep in the fountain. A jazz ensemble played from a cage like the go-go girls in the 60s. Technical glitches, electronic sound effects, painted faces, narrations, and balloons abounded. The searchlights searched for the balloons. Amateur dancers, clowns, people of dubious gender, acrobats, and brass bands took turns attempting to add energy to the lethargic pace. The children’s chorus sang African songs with clapping routines. The shadow dancing was replaced by a trampoline. When 10 o’clock rolled around it seemed to be hitting a climax and I thought maybe the end of the hour would cause an arbitrary cessation, like John Cage would have done, and put us all out of our misery. But no, it continued on with the rap episode, the band playing Russian music, Japanese robotic dancers above the Thuringian restaurant (which a friend assured me symbolized Hiroshima), the bass player in the jazz band climbing around the outside of his cage, the Männerchor crossing the square to switch places with the children’s chorus, narrated breathing in and out exercises (altogether now, “atmet ein; atmet aus”), the sax player breathing in and out, more balloons and a rope trick. Finally the children’s chorus reentered the square on bicycles, and I thought surely this is the finale. But no, we needed to have a bad brass band (on par with a 1A middle school band in rural Texas) march on stage, more clowns, and the emcee trying to whip up the crowd with chants of “Bauhaus is coming.” The crowd muttered. The children’s chorus and the band marched leisurely out of the square. There was hope. But then the clown fire department had to come in and take the emcee away (an event that might have brought cheers an hour earlier). And then a new emcee had to take the stage and spend ten minutes reading off the list of credits. He brought his buddy on stage for some hugs. A single roman candle went off, and at 11 o’clock the crowd offered tepid applause and drifted away. It was so much like a 60s “happening,” so unbelievably self-indulgent, so pointless, I finally understood why smoking dope was important in the 60s. We could not endure the artistic nonsense without it.
