Susanne Lenz – NOperas!

Jasmin (Xenia) Knitter was born in May 1999 and grew up in Berlin. Since childhood, fashion and storytelling have been among her greatest passions. Influenced by Berlin’s club culture and her night-time wanderings through the city, her sense of colour, authenticity and contrasts flows into her work.

After completing her training at the Modeschule Berlin (graduating in 2021), she worked as a costume assistant at various theatres in German-speaking countries. Since the 2024/25 season, she has been permanently engaged at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. She created her first costume designs in 2023 for short films at the Film University Babelsberg, independent music video productions, the Munich Biennale and the Roter Salon at the Volksbühne. ‘Die Kantine’ is her second collaboration with Nico Sauer.

The Saarländisches Staatstheater in Saarbrücken is a multi-disciplinary theatre offering opera, drama and ballet performances at venues including the Staatstheater, Alte Feuerwache, sparte4 and Congresshalle. Its programme includes around 30 premieres and new productions each year. Around 200,000 visitors attend more than 700 events each season.

www.staatstheater.saarland

It will end as quickly as it began. The DRITTE DEGENERATION OST begins rehearsals at its last stop across the old federal states. This time with a proper pause for reflection between venues. What do you do now?
Economically, it would be to say: ‘So! Two months to take care of the next project!’ Or: go on holiday!
Not so with DRITTE DEGENERATION. Immediately after the premiere in Gelsenkirchen, when the project still had a good deal of residual heat, the final conception phase of the production continued. Always with the question in mind: What could be better?
In my opinion, there is no such thing as a finished work in the theatre. What’s more. The moment of supposed completion throws all the participants into the orcus. Where something ‘sits’, boredom takes over. If at all. If the whole chair doesn’t tip over and take all the participants with it. It’s not for nothing that a good dress rehearsal is a bad omen.
Even worse are those who claim that a piece would have been better with one, two or three working days. Then it would have been good – so it could have been finished before the premiere. A directorial mistake that assumes you have something to do with the success of an evening. A ‘wonderfully staged’ play fails because of bored actors, over-sung voices and over-worked technical staff. Whereas any weakness in a production can be made up for by the work of those actually involved.
The director should realise that as the time to the premiere diminishes, their own importance and potential decreases exponentially. You may still be the actual artistic director at the concept rehearsal. The very next morning, you only own half of it at most. And the very next day, you can only hope for good luck that someone is still listening to you.
This makes it all the more important to prepare for this ‘empty time’ of diminishing sovereignty of vision by strengthening the beginning, i.e. the concept.
So the work continued!

An important point was, also precisely for this reason, the strengthening of characters, roles, personal dimensions that can be achieved on stage. The material that is handed to the players, with which they can independently take the evening to the agreed development stage. If you continue with the same score, who should develop it further if not the performers themselves? Developing should then perhaps also mean developing ‘US’ from our last month’s DEVELOPMENTS in terms of personnel, art and budget.
But we won’t leave the score completely untouched either, with a text change here and there, one or two scenes shifted, swapped and condensed. The normal viewer may hardly notice the level of detail that has been tweaked, but for us the most important points have been reset. A more gradual introduction of the characters, which, through a simple scenic twist in the first act, tells the entire narrative more stringently as the inner journey of our protagonist, as a psychological condensation of his perception of the world.
At least that’s what we’re hoping for.
We’ll see if our regular audience (yes, there is such a thing!) likes it.
Now it’s back to rehearsals.
And then perhaps it will be the last time: OPER OTZE AXT.

trained as a bespoke tailor and completed a degree in Fine Arts/Stage and Costume Design at the Weißensee School of Art in Berlin. Her work as a costume and set designer has been seen at the FFT Düsseldorf, Schaubühne Berlin, Münchner Kammerspiele, Münchner Volkstheater, Konzerttheater Bern, Stadttheater Klagenfurt, Sophiensaele Berlin, the Ruhrtriennale, several times at the Radikal Jung Festival, Donaufestival Krems, Tanz im August Berlin, Athens Biennale 2018 and FIBA Buenos Aires 2021. She has worked with Noam Brusilovsky and Lotta Beckers as well as Heinrich Horwitz and Rosa Wernecke for many years. Maria Magdalena Emmerig is a co-founder of The Agency (2015-2022), whose performances have been shown internationally.

After several visits to the opera houses in Münster and Darmstadt – where ‘Die Kantine’ (The Canteen) will premiere in spring 2026 – much of the concept of music theatre moving through the opera house has been consolidated. Most of the venues we will perform at have been finalised, as have the routes in between. The cast, 15 instruments in total, one from each group, musicians involved in the scenery, permission from various trades such as the costume department to include their rooms. This – and much more – has to be finalised before the actual work can begin. The space has to be negotiated before the material, the structure before the narrative.
The approach in ‘Die Kantine’ differs fundamentally from what is normally performed as an opera in these theatres: there is no concrete material to start with, from which we start, let alone a fully composed score that is staged in a new way. At first there is nothing – except the concept. And even that has to retain a self-confident fluidity. As we delve deeper into the project, the originally clear ideas become cloudy. And that’s a good thing. They condense. Matter changes its aggregate state. From hot application air to dripping concept condensates. At this point, we can take stock – original concept vs. what has emerged as particularly exciting from our research over the last few months.
Role reversal – artistic staff swap tasks with non-artistic staff. Conceptually appealing: the cellist puts make-up on the singer, who actually works in the evening wardrobe and is currently being replaced by the artistic director, while the caretaker plans the programme for the next season. However, a paradox arises in the realisation: visibility is created – but at the expense of difference. The subtleties of the respective activities become blurred, and with them the expressive possibilities of those involved. The result is not democratisation, but aesthetic smoothing. However, ‘Die Kantine’ does not want to mix up the roles from the outside, but rather reveal the inner mechanisms of the roles themselves. The exchange of roles must therefore be understood as a re-enactment of the re-enactment – not as an exchange of functions, but as a visualisation of their staging. An opera from the opera with the opera through the opera. Opera shelter – a biotope in a permanent and befitting state of disaster. It is no coincidence that the opera buildings seem to resemble large bunkers. The deeper one penetrates into their catacombs, the more the impression is reinforced. Something is protected or hidden behind the embrasure-like windows and the thick concrete walls. While the subjects being dealt with on stage are actually irrelevant, the opera company itself is a blueprint of a pre-industrial society of estates, a guild body. People carry out professions that have long since been automated and rationalised away in real life. The opera house is the shelter in which people put their heart and soul into their work.
The canteen – origin, utopia and open end. What the canteen in ‘Die Kantine’ is all about must remain an open question until the very last moment. The hypothesis is that the canteen is a place of horizontality, at odds with the steep hierarchy of the opera business. But perhaps it is also just a pretence. A place of longing that eludes our grasp – precisely because it is so concrete. During my time as a student, I worked part-time as a surtitler at the Badisches Staatstheater. From this perspective, I not only saw many operas, but also the operations, the staff, the routes between the departments and the building itself. In addition to the control room, from which we ran the surtitles, the canteen was my meeting point. Scenes took place here that still haunt me today: bodies in white make-up in baroque dresses in front of their ‘Toast Madagascar’ – crocodile people and SS officers drinking wheat beer. Grotesque simultaneity. The canteen was a fever dream – and at the same time the most real place in the house. Perhaps that is its paradoxical potential: it is what is never shown, but has already been realised throughout the play. Cipher, empty space, space of possibility. Title and illusion. Opera material.

Essen main station, on the way to the Otze premiere: Many take the wrong route in their search for freedom / © Roland Quitt

At the start of rehearsals for a NOperas! production, there is usually no finished play, but rather a pool of prepared ideas from which the performance is then developed with the involvement of the actors. When moving to a second theatre, a production like this cannot simply be ‘recast’ – with new actors, new ideas, thoughts and skills come into play. This does not mean a ‘reset’ for the production team, but it does require a willingness to take several steps back and make a new start.
In addition, the participating theatres usually differ in terms of the preconditions that are set for the production. Unlike in Darmstadt, OPER OTZE AXT does not have a choir in Gelsenkirchen and Bremen. The decision to use the Darmstadt choir was therefore linked from the outset with the task of keeping an eye on alternative approaches to the scenic and musical aspects.
The role of Otze’s hostile outer world, embodied by the choir in Darmstadt, is now transferred to the soloist ensemble in Gelsenkirchen, which, as in Darmstadt, also represents the conflicting inner voices of Otze’s torn self. At the MiR, a psychotic space is created from the outset, in which inside and outside blur into one another.
The Gelsenkirchen ensemble (Timothy Edlin, Almuth Herbst, Yevhen Rakhaminin, Thomas Brinkmann) now explores the conflict potential of individual scenes to a greater extent than was the case in Darmstadt – while Otze previously appeared primarily as a man of sorrows, he now becomes much more of a fighter and rebel at the MiR. Aksan Geisler’s conducting fits in well with this dramatisation. Together with the chamber ensemble of the Neue Philharmonie Westfalen, he places a strong emphasis on noise and makes the score sound much more unruly than it did in Darmstadt. The volume in the punk numbers is now also pushed to the pain threshold.
Burlesque moments carried by the ensemble’s joy of playing, which made the audience laugh in Darmstadt, are hardly to be found in the Gelsenkirchen OTZE. And if this second version strikes me as darker and altogether more ‘punk’ than the first, then this is also thanks to a change in lighting direction (Patrick Fuchs), which now largely avoids anything colourful, alternating between monochrome (some scenes are completely bathed in blue, others in red) and/or dramatic shadow play.
The press already reacted favourably to OPER OTZE AXT in Darmstadt. Now also in Gelsenkirchen. Some illustrious dignitaries of the historic West German punk scene – members of Bochum’s ‘Kassierer’ and the Hamburg band ‘Slime’ – didn’t want to miss out on this play and had ventured into the MiR, still a temple of bourgeois high culture. In one of the front rows, they waited with rather sceptical looks to see what the opera house would make of their performance. Afterwards, there was much appreciation, and not just for the musical punk numbers. ‘That was all right’, “cashier” Wolfgang Wölfli told the WAZ afterwards (and this sounds like very high praise), “but we’re a bit more down-to-earth – not so dramatic!”. But well, that’s just the way it is in the theatre.

As a costume designer, I understand my job in two ways: on the one hand, I have to develop a visual language with clearly legible characters that support the vision of the directing team and reinforce the plot and role work; on the other hand, I want to offer the audience visual stimuli, inspire and entertain them through my craft. For OPER OTZE AXT, I was asked to design punk costumes for opera singers (or opera costumes for punks?). The East German punk legend ‘Otze’, his five doppelgangers (the archetypal roles of Magician, Shadow, Thug, Injured Animal and Unofficial Employee), his ‘Vadder’ and the citizens of the GDR (as a choir) were to be outfitted for three different musical theatre stages in (West) Germany. In the following lines I will now explain some aspects and backgrounds of my design concept for OPER OTZE AXT.

The work began with research into the ‘fashion’ of punks in the GDR, although the term ‘fashion’ should be used with caution at this point. For the early punks, dressing was the opposite of fashion, a gesture of rejection of conformity, of resistance, of the search for individuality. Nevertheless, it is known that Eastern punks imitated the aesthetics of Western punk movements. For the strictly regulated mores of the GDR, where fashion was organised in five-year plans, this represented a form of criticism of the system. In addition, everything had to be made by the punks themselves: everyday clothes were re-sewn, dyed, discoloured, sprayed and labelled. The GDR punks dressed in dark suit trousers or work trousers, often with braces or a high-water cut, combined with trench coats, chequered or dark jackets and rare leather jackets. White shirts with thin ties or self-painted T-shirts were common. They wore safety pins, chains made from toilet flushers, dog strangles or razor blades as anti-jewellery. Their hairstyles were short and shaggy, and their faces were often decorated with black lips, red cat eyes or painted scars. In the beginning, punks dressed quite neatly, albeit with daring styling; later, the ‘classic’ punk look emerged: dirty, torn, stained, patched. Badges, armbands and lettering on clothing displayed band names such as Sex Pistols or Clash as well as political slogans. (Source: Michael Horschig: In der DDR hat es nie Punks gegeben. In: ‘Wir wollen immer artig sein…’ Berlin 1999, pp. 10-22).

During my research, an increasingly urgent question arose: If costume usually transfers the norm of a culture onto the stage, how do you portray a part of society that rejects the system and lives in resistance to it without disarming that in an aesthetic formalisation, turning it into a dead symbol? How can you create costumes that embody the aesthetics of punk in the moment, before it is assimilated and becomes a fashion? How can the interaction between fashion, resistance and the search for one’s own individuality be represented in costume?

The costumes were made almost exclusively by selecting, adapting and combining costume items from the stock of the theatres with which the DDO cooperated as part of NOperas! On the one hand, this way of working is true to the punk ethic, which positions itself as critical of consumption and in which creativity and self-expression emerge from the transformation of found material. In addition, the creation of costumes from the various inventories and in close collaboration with the theatres’ wardrobe masters is a sustainable practice because it conserves material resources, saves costs and strengthens social relationships.

The costumes were therefore created from a mixture of theatre finds and everyday clothing. Relatively quickly, I came up with the idea of experimenting with baroque-style theatre costumes. Baroque costumes are not only colourful, opulent, pompous and decidedly ‘theatrical’ – and therefore perfectly suited to portraying ‘costumedness’. The choice of this period was a metaphor for a turning point, an era of upheaval, crisis and reorganisation. In the early modern period, feudalism collapsed and the free market took its first forms, the power of the church was shaken, modern science and democracy emerged, while wars and social upheavals raged: between the Thirty Years‘ War and the Peasants’ Wars. In the 1980s, the socialist dictatorship of the GDR collapsed, the political system changed from one-party rule to democracy, and capitalism replaced the planned economy. Many people in the GDR experienced the upheaval as existential uncertainty, just as people in the early modern era believed they were close to the end of history. In Stotternheim, a portal opens up between two epochs, a connection between the early modern era and the fall of communism. On stage, the Otze lookalikes repeatedly don and doff baroque jackets and waistcoats. The scenic moves activate new plots – a punk concert, the first visit to the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the idea of patricide. They wear black combat boots with steel toe caps and dirty work trousers, their faces are expressively made up with thick eyeliner and dark colour gradients. Meanwhile, the chorus, in grey work clothes, with light-coloured powder, black contact lenses and cheap wigs, portrays the uniformity of mass society from the perspective of the punks. In the third act, shortly before the Wall is opened, the magician announces: ‘Come and see. / The wheel of history has turned for the last time.’ The image of the wheel appears in the costume design in the form of a figure-of-eight ruff, which is worn by all the actors – a baroque fashion accessory that unmistakably symbolises that time of transition. Luther, Otze, preaching and performing, the baroque and the turning point…

In OPER OTZE AXT, historical costumes were transferred to a foreign sign system, where they encountered work clothes, used fabrics and improvised additions. This refraction posed the question of the ‘costume-ness’ of fashion and the performative act of dressing – not only in punk, but also in relation to the main character Otze and his era. At the same time, there was a meta-reflection on theatrical means and on how roles can be told visually across epochs. But what does this aesthetic mean in today’s political climate? Has the wheel of history turned again after all? Are we living in a new baroque era, in a turning point in which systems are crumbling and ideologies are being overtaken, in which a new age is being heralded while the old one has not yet disappeared? And if so, how will we dress for it?

One person writes a text, another composes music to these words, and yet another person is then responsible for interpreting what has been created scenically – this is how the work normally takes place where municipal or state theatres are involved in contemporary music theatre. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this procedure, but there have long been additional ways of working that also lead to other forms. ‘NOperas!’ attempts to introduce them into the music theatre business.
In Darmstadt, OPER OTZE AXT’s play development has now produced its first artistic result. Significant changes were also made during the rehearsal process. The majority of the spoken scenes were cancelled shortly before the premiere. This made the plot more associative and left out a lot of the explanations. ‘The result,’ writes the online magazine “Egotrip”, ’is a coherent 80-minute impression that this theatre, whether grumbling or depressive, is always raging in the minds of the protagonists.’
‘Almost expressionistic’ is how this internalised drama appeared to the Darmstädter Echo after the premiere. In contrast, ‘Egotrip’ feels reminiscent of the form of ‘ancient tragedy’ – on the one hand due to the special role of the chorus, and on the other because of Antonia Beeskov’s commentary voice, an epic element in the style of the classical messenger report.
References to theatre history everywhere. All the way to Rainer Nonnenmann, who is reminded of Hamlet’s father for the silent role of Otze’s father (Martin Gerhardt). None of this seems wrong to me.
‘The epic is at the expense of the drama’ criticises Nonnenmann at the same time. However you judge the whole thing, it’s certainly true: The performance hardly fits into the framework of conventional drama. What is usually told as a psychological plot in the theatre is here packed into a dramaturgy of still images.
The ‘Darmstädter Echo’ is also on the right track when it comes to categorising this project: ‘Despite the title, the term “opera” does not seem appropriate to us,’ it says. Well, even if the word opera appears as a reference in the title, it was never about delivering an opera. After all, the term ‘NOperas’ contains the word ‘opera’ as well as the word ‘no’.
Elections were held in Germany yesterday. 47 out of 50 constituencies in the former territory of the GDR went to the AfD. Did ‘We are the people’ already sound ethnic back then? Provocatively and accompanied by laughter from the audience, OPER OTZE AXT interprets the unification of the two German states as a voluntary self-surrender by East Germany for the price of bananas and welcome money. How quickly the ‘Round Table’ was sidelined at the time, looking for solutions other than simple affiliation. If not as an opera, how could OPER OTZE AXT be categorised? Perhaps as a German-German mystery play about the dialectic of freedom.

For the members of the ‘’Dritte Degeneration Ost (Third Degeneration East)‘’, dealing with Schleimkeim, their frontman Dieter ‘’Otze‘’ Ehrlich and, more generally, with the punk movement of the 1980s is a dive into the realm of distant events. For me, who moved to West Berlin during this time, it is an immersion in memories that are not well organised.
On the façade of the house in the north of Wedding where I first lived, there were still shell impacts from the 1940s. ‘Never again war!’ was the motto in Germany later on, but SPD Chancellor Schmidt had recently pushed through the deployment of medium-range missiles aimed at the East as part of the so-called “Nato Double-Track Decision”. Together with my generation, I also lived in the conviction that the world could blow up in our faces at any moment, and this time for good.
People of the same age had similar thoughts on the other side of the Mauser. But while the churches there were forging swords into ploughshares, we younger West Berliners had already come to terms with the future. We were full children of the economic miracle. But you could read ‘No Future’ on every other corner. This strange end-time feeling was insurmountable. And just like in the 1920s: Berlin, even if this time only its western part, was dancing on a volcano. It wasn’t worth wasting thoughts on the future. We wanted to get as much as possible out of the here and now.

Techno was emerging in this West Berlin of the mid-1980s. Punk, I think, no longer played a really important role as a music genre. It was outdated and commercially appropriated by Neue Deutsche Welle. It had moved on and become something else in the noise excesses of Neubauten.
And yet punk was not dead. Whichever of the individual scenes with their respective dress codes you belonged to in West Berlin: if you didn’t wear black, you could be sure of being turned away by the doorman of any reasonably hip club. The Schöneberg Goths and New Romantics were a kind of post-punks who styled their punky skulls at trendy hairdressers and bought their gold-plated safety pins in expensive fashion shops. They were mainly ‘Wessis’, as they were called in Berlin at the time, who had moved here from West Germany to escape the boredom and hypocritical idyll of West Germany. And there were still the real and proper punks, born in Kreuzberg, Neukölln or Siemensstadt, albeit in a different neighbourhood. They were rarely much older than twenty. You’d inevitably get hit on by them (‘Hey mate, have you got a mark?’) when you got off the underground at Nollendorfplatz or Kottbusser Tor.

Even back then, there were a huge number of homeless people in West Berlin. I had made it a rule to give something to at least every third person who opened their hand. But no punk ever received a single penny from me. Wasn’t there a mum at home who would have been happy to give them a sandwich? To me, they were snotty truants. If I had told them that I was financing my studies by working night shifts on the assembly line at the Reinickendorf pizza factory, wouldn’t they have thought I was a laughable idiot?
I found out in an embarrassing way that punks didn’t exist in the East either when I met three female punks near the border crossing after a visit to the East Berlin opera. I thought they were tourists from West Berlin and tried to make fun of them: ‘Just hurry back over: it’s all grey here, who can stand it!’ I unintentionally showed myself to be the arrogant Wessi type, who – after this word changed its meaning – later incurred the increasing anger of the East Germans.
East punks and West punks, I still find it difficult to connect the two movements. The one rebelled against capitalism, the other against (actually existing) socialism. ‘Break what breaks you!’ sang Ton Steine Scherben back in the 1970s. But what if both were broken then? The anarchists’ “A” adorned the jackets of many punks, at least in West Berlin. What was meant was: ‘Let everyone do what they like!’. Even back then, this struck me as a childishly simplified understanding of the political idea of anarchism, which does not strive for ‘no power for anyone’, but equal power for all and leads to a social system of shared responsibility that is light years away from the punk attitude to life. ‘Why don’t you destroy yourself!’ sang Otze Ehrlich, somewhat logically, five years after German-German reunification. Without ‘No Future’, punk couldn’t be punk and so that was the only consequence that remained.

Photo 1: Antonia Beeskow (sound design, performance), Richard Grimm (composition) Photo 2: Neil Valenta (music director), Georg Festl (baritone), Clara Kreuzkamp (mezzo), Frieda Gawenda (composition, vocals, performance), Julia van der Horst (dramaturgy assistant), Romy Dins (director)

The story of the GDR punk band Schleimkeim and its singer and guitarist Dieter ‘Otze’ Ehrlich inspires this project by the ‘Dritte Degeneration Ost’ collective.
How does Ehrlich explain his own downfall after the demise of the GDR? Was he unable to cope with the freedom he had previously fought for? Was the freedom he achieved perhaps not the one he had fought for? (Had he, one might ask, fought for anything at all?)
In any case, we are still waiting for the ‘blossoming landscapes’ that Kohl promised for the whole of eastern Germany in 1990. And quite a few of those who cried out for freedom back then are now in favour of abolishing it again.
The basic idea of OPER OTZE AXT remains that Ehrlich’s story tells more than a personal fate, that it has something to do with today’s problems of a united Germany.
Rehearsals in Darmstadt begin in January.
Early December: extensive preparatory meeting with vocal ensemble and musical director. Talks about feXm and NOperas!, about personal perspectives on West and East German history, which differ according to personal background and age. Talks about opera and punk. About working methods and musical approaches.
The composition is a collective responsibility. It is also pluralistic on a vocal level: opera voices (from the Darmstadt ensemble), ‘natural’ voices (from the performers of DDO) and the equipment of Antonia Beeskow, who then puts the vocals through the electronic wringer.
The score was only recently finalised. Much of it remains sketchy and is intended to be freely improvised. Much is still subject to change and adaptation in the rehearsal process.
You can’t get much further away from the usual musical theatre routine with all this. The project demands a considerable amount of experimentation from the soloists involved.
Mezzo-soprano Clara Kreuzkamp brings openness and curiosity. Georg Festl not only sings Figaro and Leporello. He is also a rock guitarist and a self-confessed AC/DC fan. Thomas (Tom) Mehnert brings experience from a wild project at the Munich Biennale. So it all comes down to the afternoon, when the composition team and vocal ensemble go into retreat together. For the ‘’Dritte Degeneration Ost‘’ and for OPER OTZE AXT, this is the hour zero that has been awaited with some nervousness.
How fertile was the morning’s dialogue?
Trying out what you can do with your voice. Improvising. Without sheet music. Absolutely – Frieda Gawenda takes the lead – but with a plan.
Microphones are wired up. Effects devices are connected. The dramaturge and directing team are chased away and sent out into the sleet of the Rhine plain.

Jasmin Knitter