Retrospective of the Art of Mark Sieczkarek

PATHS THROUGH MY GARDEN

This retrospective came to an end last weekend with the presentation of the film STREETWEAR

thoughts by Klaus Dilger

„Art is timeless, if it is to be art at all – and yet the processes of production impose a sense of urgency upon artists, often preventing them from ever bringing their art into being. Mark did not belong to that kind of “time” – and precisely for that reason, we have lost so much that never had the time to mature and become art.

He was still working on his first major retrospective, paths through my garden – Art by Mark Sieczkarek, which, from 9 to 26 October, will thankfully be on view at the Alte Schauspielhaus – the planned Pina Bausch Centre. The exhibition is a journey through the artistic worlds of this multifaceted and gifted dancer and choreographer. He would have turned sixty-three.“

This retrospective – with its exhibition, performances, films and discussions – came to an end last weekend with the presentation of the film STREETWEAR, which had its Wuppertal premiere in January 2025. It can also be read as a call to reconsider the way art and artists are supported and to act accordingly.

The announcement for this final evening read:
“In Streetwear, Wuppertal gains a fascinating and multifaceted life of its own through Mark Sieczkarek and the film’s rich variety of individual episodes, breaking down the boundaries between art and everyday life. Stars of the international dance-theatre scene appear alongside local artists: Pina Bausch legends Julie Shanahan, Ophelia Young and Kenji Takagi dance side by side with Wuppertal-based creatives Karlo Wentzel and Udo Sträßer – all dressed in Sieczkarek’s one-of-a-kind costume creations made from recycled everyday materials. Created during the pandemic, at a time when the world stood still, this film celebrates life in its wildest and most colourful form. A film that proves: art can arise wherever people have the courage to dream. With its visual splendour, this film turns Wuppertal into the secret capital of contemporary dance.”

Mark Sieczkarek had a fine sense of humour, and perhaps he might have smiled quietly and gently at this text – few would have noticed if that smile had concealed a trace of sadness.

For Mark was no loudspeaker – quite the opposite – and perhaps that is why so many only realised, after the onset of his brief illness and his far too early death, that both the artist and his art deserved visible appreciation without having constantly to fight for it. It was a struggle Mark had long grown weary of – in a world where appearance, masquerading as value, increasingly drowns out the true values of art. This was not only his fate, but that of many artists in this country. Perhaps this retrospective could serve as a moment for reflection – even rethinking?

Paths-Through-my-garden©TANZweb_Klaus-Dilger

OF GARDENS AND RUINS

The most enchanting gardens are often those in which nature, in all its wild force and beauty, is allowed to reclaim its space – most often among ruins, when we simply let it. The old Schauspielhaus in Wuppertal belongs to that category of building – as painful as that may sound.

The power of nature, which does not ask about value or utility but follows only its own order, can thus be read as an inspiring act of freedom.

BÖLL AND „THE FREEDOM OF THE ARTS“

It is not yet sixty years since Nobel Prize laureate Heinrich Böll stood on this very site in 1966, at the opening of the Wuppertal Schauspielhaus, in the presence of Federal President Heinrich Lübke, and delivered a fiery speech: a warning against the growing dominance of capitalist value-worship and a plea “for the freedom of art”:

“What it [art] needs – the one and only thing it needs – is material. It does not need freedom, for it is freedom; one can take away its freedom to manifest itself – but no one can grant it freedom. No state, no city, no society can pride itself on giving art what it already is by its very nature: free.”

And Böll went even further:

“How far it may go, or might have been allowed to go, no one can tell it in advance. It must, therefore, go too far in order to find out how far it may go, how long its leash of freedom truly is. Art does not only bring forth or offer – it is the only recognisable manifestation of freedom on this earth.”
(And yet still tethered to a ‘leash of freedom’ – editorial note.)

Böll’s speech, delivered in the “city of Engels”, was thus also a demand: to give art and artists free access – or better still, to place directly in their hands the means of their own production.

Paths-Through-my-garden©TANZweb_Klaus-Dilger

In 1966, few could have imagined that ten years later a young artist would turn upside down not only the world of this newly inaugurated eleven-million-Deutschmark building but also that of dance itself.
Ten more years after that, the young Scotsman Mark Sieczkarek, trained at the Royal Ballet School, came to join Pina Bausch in Wuppertal.

He would stay only two seasons before relinquishing the “security” of a fixed engagement in order to realise his own visions of dance – freely.

AHNEN ahnen

In Pina Bausch’s film AHNEN ahnen, part of the retrospective PATHS THROUGH MY GARDEN, which the dance-theatre icon produced and edited as a “block of thought” to convey her view of the intended form of DIE KLAGE DER KAISERIN – her first and only film – the audience, and especially the professional dance practitioners among them, could already “sense” that not all the paths of the protagonists shown there would continue in the same direction.

Although Pina Bausch, with growing international recognition and support, was already consolidating the breakthrough of her dance theatre, the dance world of the early and later 1980s remained in a state of upheaval. Many of the most distinguished dancers and choreographers left the rigid structures of municipal and state theatres to establish their own ensembles and artistic practices.

Thus, little by little – also in North Rhine-Westphalia – a free dance-theatre scene emerged, among whose leading figures Mark Sieczkarek would soon be counted.

diskussion-AHNEN©Ralf-Silberkuhl

In the discussion following AHNEN ahnen – with former Pina Bausch dancer and later Head of Dance at Wuppertal’s Department of Culture, Urs Kaufmann, and the independent choreographer Nathalie Larquet, skilfully moderated by Marion Meyer – the artist referred to an interview with Mark Sieczkarek. In it, he had been asked what dream he still cherished after twenty years of independent creative work. He replied:

“I still have the dream of receiving support — for a permanent ensemble, a rehearsal space, and a place where we can perform regularly, where we can have stable structures, and where other dreams can become possible …”

(Whenever mention is made here of a “permanent ensemble” and “stable structures”, the terms free and artistically self-determined must always be understood as implied.)

Paths-Through-my-garden©TANZweb_Klaus-Dilger

This interview with the WZ was given by Sieczkarek in 2011, two years after the death of Pina Bausch and shortly after the closure of that very Schauspielhaus — because the City of Wuppertal either could not or would not raise the 13.5 million euros required to renovate the now-dilapidated building and its stage technology.
The main argument at the time: there was neither need nor demand in the city for two large venues (opera house and playhouse) offering a total of 1,600 seats. Then as now, the spectre haunting politics was not the investment in a building itself, but the financing of its ongoing running costs.

Mark Sieczkarek’s dream remained unfulfilled.
Yet he remained true to himself in his artistic principles:

“The idea of creating my own stage sets and costumes arose because I wanted to show spectacular or simply beautiful things on stage — and with little money. But through this I discovered that the pieces bore my own signature and could be presented as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk,”

said the Scottish artist, who considered everything too precious simply to be thrown away, in another conversation with the WZ.

A small sense of this could be pieced together by the many visitors over three long weekends — fragments, images, photographs, memories — and their thanks went also to the initiators, foremost among them Uta Atzpodien and Kerstin Hamburg, as well as Wigabriel Soto Eschenbach and others.

They were evenings of farewell, and yet one would like, if only for a brief moment, to imagine how this late public recognition might have taken place — and looked — in one of society’s official temples, such as the Bundeskunsthalle or another museum of contemporary art, where there is no trace of the poverty that marks the life of the independent artist…

Many took these occasions to bid their own farewell to Mark — who for many years had also worked with amateurs, with and without disabilities.
Some of his former artistic colleagues contributed directly to the performance evenings; others shared their thoughts and memories in the subsequent discussions — often as a deeply personal goodbye.

The reviewer of this article truly missed seeing one of Mark Sieczkarek’s works presented in its original form and authenticity.
Would it not have been possible — and worthwhile — to restage and present, for example, his last Gesamtkunstwerk „the tired queens garden“, which he created within UNDERGROUND V for Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch?

It would have been such a fitting example of the paths leading into Mark’s work in PATHS THROUGH MY GARDEN.