HELMUT  OEHRING

S P E A K   L O U D E R ,   S H O U T ,   C A U S E   I   A M  D E A F 

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Ludwig van Beethoven's cries for help remain silent letters in the Heilgenstadt Testament, as in other letters to trusted companions. At the age of 32, he faces death in his writing and then fights his way to immortality through his compositions for another quarter of a century. Beethoven's gradual deafness in connection with his self-image as a composer and fellow human being is at the center of the MusicFilmDanceRequiem BEETHOVEN? The redemptive Fault. In his audiovisual score of new compositions and radio plays, letter quotations and sign language poetry, interactive choreography of dance and film, Helmut Oehring encrypts Beethoven's inscriptions and gives him back his innermost secret: that of a genius condemned to inner hearing, who forces himself to creative expression and uses his music to build a bridge to the hearing world, whose social and artistic future lies close to his wounded heart. Beethoven, a bridge person – in between. 

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Also a bridge person, dancer Kassandra Wedel, who became deaf in an accident at the age of four, embodies Beethoven's “immortal beloved” as well as the inner voice and physical medium of his language and music in the process of deafness, his creative work in growing isolation and loneliness, despair and longing: Where am I not wounded, cut up? (Ludwig van Beethoven)

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Helmut Oehring also sees himself as a bridge person:  Through my socialization in the language and culture of deaf people, I grew up with people who became deaf before birth or after acquiring language, but also with people who suddenly or gradually lost their hearing due to a stroke of fate. I am familiar with the communicative, psychological, and social strategies used by deaf people to interact in a hearing world. We hearing people cannot imagine what Beethoven's deafness meant for him as a person and composer and what consequences it had, regardless of his learning or losing various communication mechanisms and tactics. This is a dimension of silence that we hearing people cannot even begin to comprehend. And from this silence, Beethoven pushes a kind of photograph of his inner score under the door crack from his unheard-of sound cosmos into our world full of loudness and noise.