is a bilingual writer living in London who focuses on poetry, essays and opera libretti. He has published two books of poetry in Croatia (“Listing Thing” 2013, “Dropdown Menu” 2015) and has had two operas performed at the Royal Opera House in London, UK (“Colony” 2015, “Greenland” 2015). Aleksandar holds an MA in Opera Writing from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and has been awarded two poetry prizes – the Ulaznica Prize, Serbia 2011, and the Fernando Pessoa Prize, Croatia 2012.
Premil Petrovic
is the founder, principal conductor and artistic director of the No Borders Orchestra, a top young orchestra composed of musicians from the former Yugoslavian states. He studied conducting with Prof. Winfried Müller at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin and participated in interpretation workshops with leading conductors such as Simon Rattle, Pierre Boulez and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Premil Petrović is one of the leading musical personalities in his native Serbia. In 1996 he founded the Music Theater at Cinema REX, one of the most important and politically active venues in Belgrade in the 1990s. In addition to the classical orchestral repertoire, he has devoted himself to numerous premieres of contemporary music. He was awarded the Hanns Eisler Prize for composition and interpretation of contemporary music.In 2015, the first CD of the No Borders Orchestra conducted by Premil Petrović was released by Deutsche Grammophon.
Foto © Melina Mörsdorf
(they/them/she/her/he/him)
is a director, choreographer and actor. Heinrich studied acting direction and choreography at the HfS Ernst Busch Berlin. She has created productions in the independent theatre scene, at various city theaters and in the new music scene. Since 2017 she has worked continuously with Ensemble Decoder. As a choreographer she worked with Sarah Nemtsov, Carola Schaal, Alexander Schubert, Ensemble Garage, Lux NM and the curator and dramaturg Elisa Erkelenz. In addition to directing and choreographing, Heinrich also works continuously as an actor in theater, film and television.
Foto © Andrew Watts
was born in Zagreb in 1983. After studying composition in Graz and Stuttgart, he specialized in electronic music at IRCAM and eventually earned his PhD at Stanford University in the class of Brian Ferneyhough. His compositions have been performed by renowned ensembles. In 2014 he founded the international festival for contemporary music Novalis in Osijek, Croatia, for which he still works as artistic director.
Foto © Alexander Chernyshkov
is a composer, performer and improviser. At the University of Vienna he studied composition with Chaya Czernowin, Karlheinz Essl and Clemens Gadenstätter. He is experimentally engaged in the construction of unique new instruments. His work focuses on composition and the practice of performative music theatre. His works are performed by important ensembles and musicians. As a composer and music theatre director, Chernyshkov’s pieces have been performed at the Hamburg State Opera, the Stanislavsky Elektrotheatre in Moscow, the Teatro alle Tese in Venice, at the Musiktheatertage Wien and at the Steirischer Herbst in Graz, among others.
www.musicexport.at/artist/alexander-chernyshkov/
Foto © Hauen und Stechen
Hauen und Stechen was founded by the music theater directors Franziska Kronfoth and Julia Lwowski. They have been working together artistically and strategically since 2012. Both studied opera directing at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin. In their work with the collective, they strive to create moving, contemporary, cross-border and genre-spanning music theater. The close collaboration with the musicians Roman Lemberg and Louis Bona, the dramaturge Maria Buzhor, the singers Angela Braun and Vera Maria Kremers, the actors Gina-Lisa Maiwald, Thorbjörn Björnsson and Günter Schanzmann, the video artist Martin Mallon, the stage and costume designers Christina Schmitt, Yassu Yabara and Günter Lemke as well as a dense network of opera singers and musicians led to the development of an idiosyncratic, wild, performative and unmistakable theatrical language. The collective works site-specifically, with the aim of bringing out the specificity of the locations through the setting of the performance and at the same time transforming them through the work of the set designers.
www.hauen-und-stechen.com
is a composer, performer, and sound artist based in Berlin. Her works focus on various modes of expression incorporating both musical and performative elements, lighting, visual arts, and other media. With great interest in the physicality of performance, since she came to Europe she has been working extensively with the human body and objects as compositional material. Zhao studied composition in CCOM Beijing, HMDK Stuttgart, and the Musik-Akademie Basel; and also scenic composition in ABPU Linz, where she also taught. She has worked with numerous artistic groups and festivals in Europe, Asia, and North America.
Foto © Saara Autere
Oblivia have been creating performances out of movement, dance, language, sound, light and gesture for over twenty years. The core team of Annika Tudeer and Timo Fredrikson has been extended or adjusted with numerous partners, collaborateurs or new company members over the years, joining the Oblivia artistic network on various levels of closeness or regularity. With works such as the “Entertainment Island” trilogy, the “Museum of Postmodern Art” series, which consists of five pieces, or “Nature Theater of Oblivia”, the company has been touring extensively throughout Europe.
Roland Quitt works as a freelance dramaturg, curator and author in the field of contemporary music theatre. He studied German, philosophy and musicology at the FU Berlin. Until 2009, he conceived more than 30 world premieres in the field of new music theatre beyond the opera form for the Theater Bielefeld and the Nationaltheater Mannheim. Together with Laura Berman, he initiated the first worldwide competition for new music theatre, Music Theater NOW, as part of the International Theatre Institute. He is chairman of the association “Zeitgenössisches Musiktheater Berlin” (ZMB), in which Berlin’s independent music theatre scene has come together, and artistic director of the BAM – Berliner Festival für aktuelles Musiktheater.
