8.19-20.06: City of Machines

Went to visit the UNESCO world heritage industrial ruin in Essen. It’s not really a ruin, as it only closed a decade ago, but it does have the feeling of an abandoned city, from a sci-fi movie maybe, or City Of Lost Children. From the web: “The Zollverein mine-cokery combo started in 1847, creating the largest coal mine in the world.” The goal was steel, and the region is dotted with coalmines and foundries. Here they connected an incredibly large mine in one area with a cokery via an elevated tube that moved the coal, in train type cars, hundreds of meters through the air to the cokery — a wall of vertical ovens that would cook the coal and covert it to coke, which burns hotter, and is needed for making steel. The cokery is a factory, but looks more like a bizarre machine that puny humans attend and feed. It’s as long a two football fields, and the heat (these are ovens, after all) and the coal dust must have been unbelievable. (The venue we’re playing in Bochum was a former gas works, supplying gas to these various factory-machines.) The architects, Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer, inspired by the Bauhaus style, designed the buildings. Zollverein XII remained in operation until 1986. I remember seeing it right after it closed — I was scouting locations for a film interpretation of The Forest, the piece I did with Bob Wilson. The Gilgamesh character in that story had been updated to an industrialist like Krupp, whose steel factory was nearby.

It’s a massive site — the size of central park, almost — and has been turned into a combination park, memorial to industry and cultural center. The cultural center part is aided by the legendary German arts budget, but even so it still moves incrementally. Only one of the giant gasworks buildings has been converted into performance spaces, for example. Next to it sits a turbine hall — 2 turbines still squatting there in the semi darkness.

The Essen site sprawls across grassy paths linked by pipes and elevated conveyers. One building houses Russian artist Kabakov’s “Palace Of Projects”, a kind of imaginary world’s fair pavilion as if made by a group of high school science students — crude, handmade and full of preposterous utopian and visionary proposals. It’s like a magical Calvino book come to life.

Another building will soon house the Essen art museum, which has outgrown its current site. There are plenty more empty shells available after that.

Buildings like these, but on a much smaller scale, have been converted in the U.S. — the Mattress Factory in Pittsburg, MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., and the DIA Nabisco factory in Beacon. But nothing approaches this scale or sheer amount of metal. This region is doing a wholesale changeover from industrialkulture to the culture industry.

The next day Thomas takes me to another Essen industrial site — this one the blast furnace complex. We view a semi-outdoor venue that is often used for the Century of Song dates and an indoor black box theater above a turbine room that can be reconfigured according to the needs of the show. A possible venue for Here Lies Love?

The blast furnace here, and its small hole, about half a meter across, at its base, is the ultimate focal point, the goal of this whole industrial valley — the coal mines, the cokeries, the gas works, the trains, the barges and ports are all about making the molten steel pour out this relatively small hole at the end of the process. Hard to conceive so much manpower, effort, creativity, sweat and resources with their vanishing point, their glorious final product, the glowing red steel that spews out the mouth (or ass?) of this giant furnace. All the elements brought together — by pipe, road, train and sea — all to make this substance that would be used to make other machines. Trains, rails, cars (eventually), cannons, ships, tanks, bridges, dynamos, girders, tools, guns. The steel makes machines that allow for the production of more steel.

There is one bridge over the Rhine from which one can see the smokestacks and cooling towers dotting the landscape in an amazing 360º panorama. Most of these factories are inactive, but a few are still puffing away. I was told that during its heyday the Ruhr valley was like Pittsburg, where the skies were so darkened by the amount of smoke that one had to turn on lamps in the daytime.

Someone else said to me, “it was here that the two world wars were ‘made’.” It’s puzzling then that the factory buildings are still standing — Berlin and Dresden were reduced to smoking hulks while so many of these factories and steelworks, so essential to the German war effort, survived. Did the Allies think they would do a Halliburton and take them over for themselves, and therefore they spared them the bombing? Or maybe they realized that without industry a defeated Germany would have no possibility of reconstruction — they would be shattered refugees — desperate, pathetic, ready for anything that would restore some dignity.

Before/after photos of bombing in Essen (Link):

And more about the bombing of the factory (Link):

Q. During WWII, what made Essen, Germany, a primary target for combined US/British bomber forces?
A. Founded by Alfred Krupp and greatly extended by his son Friedrich the Krupp iron and steel works at Essen became one of the most powerful industrial combines in the world and the largest manufacturer of arms in WWI. In the mid-1930s the factory was the centre of German rearmament. Bombing had destroyed 70 per cent of the works by 1945 and the Allies confiscated the remainder but the courts restored the works to the Krupp family in 1951. See The Encyclopedia of World War Two edited by Thomas Parrish.

Thomas W. tells us that the Chinese wanted to buy this entire site when it closed — their own coalfields are not entirely depleted — not just yet — so they can actually reanimate this creature. As this Essen colliery/cokery was the last one in the area to close the local government hesitated approving the sale, and decided instead that their glorious industrial past should be remembered, memorialized rather than obliterated and forgotten, so they declined that particular offer. They call them industruialkulture monuments. Cathedrals of Industry. Other nearby sites had been sold in entirety to the Chinese — in Dortmund a similar site was completely dismantled and shipped to China. Hundreds of workers were shipped in, housed in tents on site, meals and facilities provided, as they took the beasts apart. How did they do it? We gaze at the tangle of pipes around us, the huge metal machines that dwarf human scale. How could anyone keep track of the parts? Where would you begin? The scale is like ants taking a car apart and then reassembling it — and hoping it works.

Last night was our first performance — 3 encores, so I guess we did all right. I was pretty nervous — if you get off the rails with the orchestra they don’t accommodate, they keep right on playing what they’ve got in front of them… so you have to kind of surf their wave, and if you’re successful the connection feels natural and the intensity of my singing, for example, will anticipate what they’re going to do. If it works it doesn’t sound like anyone is following or being led; it sounds like you and the orchestra are emotionally linked. Luckily for me many of the songs have some kind of groove, so I can focus one ear on Kenny’s percussion or hi-hat and hope the orchestra and Anthony the conductor do the same. Watching and paying attention to Anthony’s baton is fun and exciting, but conductors tend to give the rhythm almost a full beat ahead to an orchestra — sort of a “this is where we’re going not where we’re at” — so looking for a downbeat from the baton is hopeless — but the tempo and the crescendos and diminuendos are all there.

The orchestral Philly soul version of "Here Lies Love" went over well, as did "Un Di Felice", which was a surprise, as I thought I’d get giggles from the classical crowd on that one.