Christoph Schlingensief passed away

As beautiful as with him it impossibly can be in heaven. He was called an enfant terrible and an agitator but his provocation was only a marginal phenomenon. He was a free, extremely empathic and congenial man, who used art to express what preoccupied him. Schlingensief did what Schlingensief had to do. Neither the technical skills nor the ability to produce something was central in his opus, it was the urge to do something.

Now he is dead, Christoph Schlingensief died on the 21st of August, 2010. The news was expected. In January 2008, Christoph Schlingensief was diagnosed with lung cancer. "As beautiful as here, it cannot be in heaven" - his journal of cancer, which he published in 2009, offers a ruthless disclosure of his fears, questions and pain. To suffer in silence, to languish without complaint and to make no fuss as a patient - as it is customary in our society that wants to know nothing of illness and death - was not Christoph Schlingensief's way. Only less than two months ago, Christoph Schlingensief presented "Via Intoleranza II", his last piece of the Opera Village project in Burkina Faso. He was on stage himself, a mere shadow of himself but still frenzied and mad at the wrong ways of human intercourse.

In a note to his death in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Literature Nobel Prize Laureate Elfriede Jelinek writes: "Schlingensief was one of the greatest artists who ever lived. I always thought one like him can not die. It is as if life itself would be dead. He was not really a stage director (in spite of Bayreuth and Parsifal), he was everything: he was the artist as such. He has coined a new genre that has been removed from each classification. There will be nobody like him."

May he rest in peace.

Below, please find Christoph Schlingensief in an on-stage interview about his "Opera Village" project with Chris Dercon at DLD 2010: