“NOperas!” goes into the next round. With the start of the 2022/23 season, the first project of the second three-year season of the funding initiative of the NRW KULTURsekretariat and the Kunststiftung NRW will begin. A jury of experts has selected a concept by the Swiss-German artist group HIATUS for implementation at several theatres.
The trio HIATUS consists of the composer Duri Collenberg, the improvisational musician Lukas Rickli and the theatre-maker Uta Plate. As a collective, they dedicate themselves to new ways of looking at social issues, working with professionals and everyday experts alike. Their NOperas! project focuses on the experiences, thoughts and feelings of a group of children from different social backgrounds and brings them into dialogue with current forms of new music theatre. Theatre action is combined with the means of an audio and video walk to create a play about elementary desires and hopes that is aimed equally at adults and children.
The Musiktheater im Revier Gelsenkirchen and the Theater Bremen are involved. The project is funded by the “Fonds Experimentelles Musiktheater” with a total of 170,000 euros. A cooperation with the Zurich festival “Blickfelder” is planned in advance. Initially, a version will be performed there that is limited to the digital level and will only become a theatrical action with singers and musicians in the course of further development in Gelsenkirchen and Bremen.
The members of the selection jury were Dr. Christian Esch (Chair, NRW KULTURsekretariat) and Csaba Kézér (Chair, Kunststiftung NRW), Sebastian Hanusa (Dramaturg at the Deutsche Oper Berlin), Brigitte Heusinger (Theater Bremen), Konstantía Gourzí (Composer and Conductor, Professor at the University of Music and Theatre Munich), Irene Lehmann (Professor of Theatre and Media Studies at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) and Michael Schulz with Anna Chernomordik (Musiktheater im Revier Gelsenkirchen).
Preview:
On 19 February 2022, the third NOperas! production “Obsessions”, a project by the composer Yiran Zhao and the theatre group Oblivia, will celebrate its premiere at the Bremen Theatre. Three singers, three performers and six musicians wander through space and time, roaming the field of the political and the private and playfully unmasking the power of desire as the driving force of human behaviour. Further performances can be seen there on 22 and 27 February. The project will then be further developed at the Wuppertal Opera, with the premiere taking place on 03.12.2022.
