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.
Nico Sauer, Jasna Witkowski, Rosa Coppola (Darmstadt 1-2, Münster 3)
What kind of spaces does theatre need?
Nico Sauer’s project ‘Die Kantine’ aims to turn the backstage, workshops and administrative wing into a stage. All these places, which otherwise remain hidden from the audience, first had to be explored by the production team in November.
Both Münster’s and Darmstadt’s old theatre buildings fell victim to air raids during the war. Both of today’s theatres are icons of post-war theatre construction. Both have two stages, each with a similar audience capacity. Otherwise, however, they could hardly be more different.
Münster’s new theatre, which opened in 1956, was squeezed into the preserved or to-be-rebuilt building stock of the old town on the site of the old one. Away from the stage, visitors wander through narrow and winding corridors. There was also little room for the workshops here. Today’s workshops are located far away from the theatre in an industrial area on the edge of the city.
Darmstadt’s theatre, on the other hand, was able to develop on a vast wasteland left behind by the war. It was not built until the late 1960s, in the midst of the ‘economic miracle’. Not only was there a lot of space available, but also considerably more financial power. Even the spacious forecourt (I don’t know of any theatre that has a larger one) demonstrates how generous the planning was here. The backstage area is also spacious and expansive. The two versions of this NOperas! project can only become correspondingly different. Will ‘Die Kantine’ in Münster have to do without the workshops?
Unlike the late new theatre building in Darmstadt, those of the 1950s were still based on the idea of a new beginning, which was also intended as an artistic one after the end of the Hitler years. In doing so, the theatre returned to the years of the pre-war avant-garde. Before Werner Ruhnau was able to live out his ideas a little later with the design of Gelsenkirchen’s new music theatre in a much larger urban space, he had already created a ‘small house’ next to the large stage in Münster, which was designed for flexible seating and enabled more participatory forms than those of the bourgeois peep-box theatre. Mannheim’s new theatre followed a similar inspiration at the same time, where the large and flexibly designed small house could also be combined to form a large arena that the audience could view from two sides.
Today, the two Mannheim theatres have long been permanently separated by a wall that was built at a later date. The flexible use of the ‘second’ venues built in the 1950s, on the other hand, is prevented everywhere by the repertoire – the effort involved in converting the audience area together with the stage night after night, depending on the performance, would be too great.
However, many theatre makers today are looking for immersive forms that involve the audience in the theatre experience. Where you are dealing with a conventional stage space, the tiers and auditorium become additional playing areas, the audience is torn out of the supposed security of a position that is limited solely to watching. (This happened, for example, in the NOperas! project ‘Kitesh’, where the auditorium even became the stage for an armed robbery).
Or, like Nico Sauer, you go one step further – you simply turn the situation around, no longer playing the stage but its exterior space.
Either way, you are playing against the idea of bourgeois illusionary theatre that has turned to stone and hardly corresponds to the challenges of our reality.
Many of the buildings erected after 1945 are now in need of refurbishment. Meanwhile, the theatre of the 19th century has returned to the minds of those responsible for the city. Instead of building the theatre of today and tomorrow, the theatre of yesterday is being restored everywhere. In the process, opportunities are being wasted that only come along once every seventy years.
31.10. - ‘OPER OTZE AXT’ construction rehearsal in Unterkassel. Bottom: In the middle ground left Markus Pockrand), right Bernd Klein (technical director of Theater Bremen and Staatstheater Darmstadt). © Roland Quitt
The design of a stage set is tested at a rehearsal before it goes into production in the workshops. In addition to technical solutions, the focus is also on spatial effects and sight lines. Components are indicated using improvised means. The location is usually the stage on which the play in question will later be performed.
Construction rehearsals as part of ‘NOperas!‘ are a special case. They take place at the first producing theatre. The design must be variable enough to be adapted to the spatial conditions of all the theatres. Departments from the other theatres also travel along for orientation. If there are not too many problems, the atmosphere is that of a professional conference. For the technical departments, it is a rare opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with colleagues from the same trade. Synergies often arise. What is difficult for one organisation can be achieved by the other. People shake hands on technical issues.
One of these special rehearsals was that of OPER ATZE AXT, not in Darmstadt, Bremen or Gelsenkirchen, but in a factory hall in Unterkassel. ‘Dress warmly, the place is unheated,’ emailed production manager Anne Bickert. From the Kassel tram stop with the deceptive name ‘Katzensprung’, it’s a long walk through an industrial area to the company premises at Hafenstraße 76. It’s not cosy there, but you can get a warming cup of coffee in the OBI supermarket 300 metres away. Someone has also brought pre-Christmas macaroons from the OBI bakery – the Christmas madness has begun. They are left lying around after an OBI joke about macaroons and sawdust.
A factory hall instead of a stage. And unlike other construction rehearsals: nothing is improvised here, everything is already in place: the final components, professionally screwed and welded together by the people of the RHO collective. Later, Brigitte, Bremen’s opera director, describes it with irony in her voice on the phone as a building rehearsal ‘that wasn’t one’.
In OPER OTZE AXT, RHO, responsible not only artistically but in this particular case also structurally for the stage, co-operate with ‘Dritte Generation Ost’, one could say they form a ‘sub-collective’ of the DDO people.
For several weeks, RHO worked in Unterkassel with industrial scrap material, some of which was acquired cheaply, some free of charge, taking inspiration from what they found, assembling it in various ways, taking it apart again and reassembling it. Three objects were created in the process: chambers placed on castors that do not attempt to conceal their origins in scrap metal, but actually exhibit them. They rest on decommissioned stage wagons donated by the Staatstheater Kassel, so that alongside Darmstadt, Bremen and Gelsenkirchen, another theatre is now contributing to this production.
For the people from RHO, who otherwise work artistically in the field of exhibitions and installations, the DDO collaboration is their first encounter with the field of theatre. Their work now has to face the theatres in Kassel, especially their safety regulations.
The encounter is also unfamiliar for the theatres. This or that would have to be additionally welded, otherwise the workshops hardly have any work of their own to do. Nevertheless, much here coincides with current trends in the field of performing arts, translating them from the field of stage action into the field of stage sculpture, so to speak: a classic philosophical attempt to define beauty is linked to the idea of differentiating its particular use from any use within the categories of practical realisability. The no-longer-useful on a practical level, to which the throwaway society, in its compulsion to ever more accelerated production, also ever more quickly sticks the rubbish label ‘become useless’, here it appears ennobled as beautiful according to such a definition.
Analogue to the way in which the projects of ‘NOperas!’ in the scenic and musical fields are usually no longer preceded by a precisely defined plan, which then only has to be ‘executed’ in the rehearsal process, this stage is also no longer preceded by a plan on paper. Just as theatre rehearsals in the context of ‘NOperas!’ serve the cautiously experimental process of finding a piece, in which the participating performers play a major role, so here too the material itself was tested and developed. Both coincide with the idea of a theatre that no longer wants to be solely illusion and thus an idealised counter-image to the real world. Just as the performer no longer hides behind make-up and masks as the person they are, and no longer sees their profession solely as ‘pretending’, this stage no longer wants to be read as a mock-up of another, but as a performer of itself.
Die Kantine © Chat GPT 4.0, gen. by Nico Sauer
Culture is not recognised as one of Germany’s national goals. For the majority of politicians, it is a nice-to-have that can be dispensed with without much ado when the belt needs to be tightened. In the context of current budget plans, the weak are hit particularly hard, as they lack institutional protection and their art is too new and unruly to serve the state, city or country for representational purposes: Welcome to the independent scene!
It will now be even more difficult for independent music theatre, whose existence as an artistic field with its own forms has to be explained again and again, even to cultural politicians. Unlike in Belgium and the Netherlands, for example, there is no separate funding for its art – within the institutions of the funding system, it competes on the one hand with the field of music, and on the other with performance, theatre and dance, and is of course usually more expensive than these and therefore often loses out when it comes to the allocation of funds. As part of the planned cutbacks to the ‘’Musikfonds‘’ and the ‘’ Fonds Darstellende Künste‘’, it is now losing out even further.
The ‘’Fonds Experimentelles Musiktheater‘’ was created as an initiative aimed first and foremost at municipal theatres and the contemporary expansion of their music theatre repertoires. Since the establishment of the NOperas! programme, it has provided even more valuable services in this direction: several theatres can participate, and the door is in principle open to any theatre. But it also serves independent music theatre. The aim is to bring the newer forms of independent theatre into the municipal theatre and to close the aesthetic gap that still separates the two.
However, only one production can be realised per season with the available funds. For the theatres, that is already quite a lot. For the large number of independent music theatre performers who compete for this production every year, it may not seem like much at first. However, it is more than nothing. At feXm, teams also find conditions for processual and sustainable work that they can only dream of elsewhere. In these difficult times, the feXm offers the scene even more important support.
Bremen, which has been involved for 2 x 3 years, will leave NOperas! from next autumn. After 1 x 3 years, Gelsenkirchen (artistic director Michael Schulz is moving to Saarbrücken) will also no longer be part of the programme. Darmstadt will begin its second three years. The Münster Theatre will join as a new partner.
From 40 applications for the 2025/26 season, the jury initially selected five finalists, who then took part in an in-depth discussion in Wuppertal. At least two of the concepts presented would have liked to have been realised. The contract was awarded to ‘Die Kantine’ from the team led by Nico Sauer. The participating establishments also bravely agreed on a project that breaks with established routines and poses challenges for their operations.
A comparison of previous NOperas! productions shows that very different paths lead beyond the opera form in music theatre today. The first to establish music theatre beyond opera in the 1960s came from the musical side. These were composers who strove for ‘visible music’ and expanded their material from the auditory to the visual. The ‘composers’ theatre’ of those years continued to branch out and developed into multimedia artists such as Nico Sauer, who saw himself as a composer, author and theatre maker at the same time.
‘NOperas!’ was still in labour pains when COVID broke out in 2019. The doors of the theatre were closed, the theatre was looking for ways out in the no-man’s land of the digital and – as it lacked a recognisable counterpart – in a preoccupation with itself. The problematisation of hierarchies and power structures in its own field of work has not let go of the stage ever since. In this project too, as its title suggests, theatre revolves around theatre. The playful revelation of its machinery of illusion based on the division of labour in a look behind the scenes, which in turn appears to be theatre and therefore manipulated, raises questions about the relationship between art and reality and the increasingly complicated search for truth that will continue to occupy us for some time to come.
born in Katowice (PL), in the zodiac sign Libra, with ascendant Libra and moon in Scorpio. In 2011, she completed her diploma in design and fine arts, specialising in graphics, at the T. Kantor Art High School and graduated in stage and costume design at the HfBK Dresden in 2017. This was followed by a permanent position at the Münchner Kammerspiele, where she worked as best girl from 2017 to 2020 with Philippe Quesne, Trajal Harrell, Florentina Holzinger, Susanne Kennedy, Marta Górnicka, Alexander Giesche and Henrike Iglesias, among others. Her work as a freelance visual designer for theatre and film has taken her to venues such as the Münchner Kammerspiele, Schauspiel Dortmund, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, Theater Augsburg, TJG Dresden, Festspielhaus Hellerau and the Gorki Theatre. She feels most comfortable somewhere between free art and enabling technical madness.
is a Germanist, translator and editor. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich with a research project on Max Bense’s cybernetic poetry. Her dissertation ‘Kathrin Rögglas Szeno-Graphien der Gegenwart. Forms and Methods of a Performative Prose (1995-2016)’ will soon be published by De Gruyter. Coppola’s research interests lie in the performativity of writing processes, both in prose and poetry, with a focus on the question of artificiality. She is currently editing the first Italian translation of Hubert Fichte’s novel Forschungsbericht (1981) for IISF Press. Since 2017 she has been curating radio and translation projects for the Goethe Institute in Naples and in 2020 won the ‘Kunst Radio-Radio Kunst’ competition organised by Radio Ö1 Vienna with an adaptation of ‘Aus der Fremde’ (1981) by Ernst Jandl.
is a Texas-born choreographer, performer, dancer, musician, media maker and all-round nonsense person living in Dresden and Berlin. She has created work for a variety of spaces including theatres, galleries, off-spaces, the internet and most recently her furniture. Her work is interdisciplinary but finds its roots in the lived experiences of the body. She is interested in process-orientated art that reveals the complex ecologies of humans and non-humans, the mathematical logic of absurdity and the profound compassion that can be found through rituals of failure.
born in Munich, has lived in Berlin since 2014. He is a multidisciplinary artist who works as a composer, performer, theatre director, filmmaker, curator and programmer. His academic background includes a bachelor’s degree in composition with Wolfgang Rihm at the Karlsruhe University of Music and at the Haute École de Musique in Geneva. He completed his master’s degree with Manos Tsangaris at the Dresden University of Music. His early works include transmedia performances such as ‘NeueMusik24’, ‘Deutsch-Afrika’ (2014) for chamber orchestra with computerised voices and ‘Love Me’ (2016) for ensemble and 100 masks. His most recent works include the 360° audio mockumentary with visuals ‘Moonbreaker 2121’, which is part of the permanent programme of the Zeiss-Großplanetarium in Berlin; in 2023, his solo opera ‘Atlantide Acide’ premiered in Paris, in which the inside of the stomach is miked using a nasogastric probe. In 2024, his road traffic opera ‘RÜBER’ was performed with great success at the Munich Biennale for Music Theatre, in which 10 performers played for nine days, eight hours a day in the streets of Munich to an audience inside a moving limousine.
Berlin, Sonnenallee (Photo: Anne Inken Bickert)
It’s a wet, grey day in September.
Street noise from Sonnenallee seeps through the gap in an open window. Building work. Sirens.
It’s nine o’clock in the morning when I start work.
In front of me, my laptop.
The perpetual clacking of the computer keyboard gives my work a rhythm. E-mails flood my inbox.
A message from Gelsenkirchen.
A message from Darmstadt.
Replies to messages from the day before yesterday.
Ping!
DM from the RHO collective. Question as to whether further expenditure on steel can be made.
Roland calls. We discuss the current status of the project.
Lunch.
Back at the laptop.
The demo tape of the first act is playing in the background.
GDR nostalgia and noise mix in my room to create a strangely beautiful tapestry of sound.
Money flows from one account to another and rushes as an invisible shadow across national borders to our composer.
More emails. More phone calls.
In the evening, a Zoom call with the collective.
Microphones crackle, the connection is poor, bottle caps are opened.
Hissing.
The call takes longer than expected again and everyone is talking in confusion.
A polyphony of different voices emerges.
A bit like an opera.
© Rüdiger Wölk
2025 – 2027
Opened in 1956, the Münster Theatre building is one of the most important theatre buildings of post-war architecture. In 1971, a second venue was added to the ”Grosses Haus“ (955 seats) in the form of the “Kleines Haus” (around 280 seats), which also meets the requirements of experimental theatre forms thanks to its variable space situation. Dr Katharina Kost-Tolmein became General Director and Head of Music Theatre in the 2022/23 season. In addition to music theatre, drama and dance, the theatre includes its own youth theatre (Junges Theater Münster) as a fourth division. With around 30 premieres and 600 performances per season, the theatre has an ambitious repertoire, which is complemented by the Niederdeutsche Bühne production, numerous guest performances and a wide-ranging supporting programme.
