15.08.2024 – Antonia Beeskow (Dritte Degeneration Ost): ‘I hear what I say. I say what I hear’ / String movements, pipes and subbotnik

In the first week of August, the team for the new opera production ‘OPER OTZE AXT’ met in Berlin to focus on composition and libretto. For five days, we concentrated on choral parts, concepts, noise frequencies and the question of how the main character Otze makes himself audible in song in the piece, when his musical freedom actually lies in the negation of conventional means? Are the sonic elements from the metallic resonances of a drainpipe, medium wave radio frequencies, old Stasi protocol recordings, which we use musically in the same way, a way of dealing with complex themes such as propaganda, power or physical-mental disorientation without talking about them directly? During a conceptual rehearsal, I thought about the image of the dog Nipper in front of the gramophone funnel – ‘His Master’s Voice’. Actually, the iconic image is an expression of the quality and clarity of the record sound, so that even a dog cannot distinguish the artificial disembodied voice of his beloved caregiver from the real one. We discussed whether the spread of an ideology, but also of a fixed thought, is ultimately reflected in what you hear and remains there, much like a catchy tune that won’t let you go.

The composition team of OPER OTZE AXT consists of the Slovakian composer Richard Grimm, who is largely responsible for writing the compositional drafts, as well as Mathias Baresel, Frieda Gawenda and – writing here – Antonia Beeskow. The last three of us will also appear as singers and actors in the productions later on. In the production, I’m focussing on the sound design and the transition from miking to acousmatic experimentation and loudspeaker music. For some scenes, however, I would also like to see a kind of fusion between classical compositional form and live sound design and editing. Over the last few days, I’ve been looking for sounds that could later be triggered as textures or samples by the orchestra or the singers. I made some field recordings at the place where we rehearsed: metal struts, a washbasin, the resonating body of a lift or the slow seepage of water in a washing trough with contact microphones. On the one hand, I am interested in the change of perspective, the unknown in the sound, the hardness and coolness of the materials. On the other hand, I hope that we will fan out a sound spectrum that is irritating: contrasts, shadows and (in)audible frequencies emerge between wood, metal, harmony and noise. Perhaps the transfer from string quartet to granular synthesis reflects the dramatic course of the story we want to tell.

It’s early summer. The team (Mathias, Frieda, Antonia as concentrated composition expertise; Frithjof and Romy from the desk corner) arrives in Kassel on Thursday night, travelling under the stars. Thanks to our co-operation with the RHO collective, we not only have a warehouse at our disposal, but also an empty office building, one of which is filled with beds, the other with stage and construction objects. RHO works for the production in the building used by the city as an interim space for documenta and other events. The approximate dimensions of the stage are marked in chalk on the floor. Rolling dogs, building materials and tools complete the situation. This is how the stage design team works: instead of on paper, ideas are realised directly in construction. For us, this is a welcome change from the dialogue- and head-heavy text and concept work.

Several objects, cubes on wheels, are presented by Laurenz and the RHO collective: Metal grids replaced the room walls and border walls. We are told that 90% of the German-German anti-fascist protective wall consisted of these same metal mesh fences. So nobody actually intended to build a wall. The anti-fascist garden fence. Next to it, a 70s West German cigarette machine. Is this the allegory of freedom?

The individual “sculptures” are given names. The “Dieter” sculpture and the “Otze” sculpture. A third one for state security. Thanks to the construction work, it is easy to talk about what we have seen. We exchange ideas. There are concerns about the modularity of the objects. Where do cables run? Which lights need to be placed where? Thanks to the spatial and technical decisions that we were able to make in this process, the work of the other trades is not only structured in terms of space, but also in terms of content. The desire to work “osmotically”, in which the positions and wishes of individuals can repeatedly answer questions and uncertainties elsewhere, seems to be taking hold.

The steel grids are miked and we are already in the music theatre. We climb an “AMPore”, place the sculptures around in all possible constellations, question the spaces that our hero will pass through: at home, at work, in a cage, in a pigsty. Long and tiring discussions in the team about the cigarette machine. In the end, there is a consensus: better to let him “die”.

The third stage of ‘Freedom Collective’ comes to a close with the premiere at the Staatstheater Darmstadt. In line with NOperas!, this production has also ‘evolved’ along the way. The diversity of the three stages alone demanded a different spatial concept for each.

The project now also seems to me to have made progress in its exploration of what emerged early on as a kind of fundamental conflict: with its setting of a complex narrative plot, ‘Freedom Collective’ belongs to the genre of contemporary opera in terms of text and music, while on the level of stage action the production team aimed for a decidedly ‘post-narrative’ theatre that is rather distant from opera. In retrospect, what kind of theatre could be created from such opposing approaches?

To recapitulate the most important points: It is not the underground club that the libretto talks about that is depicted on stage, but a gaming situation. The performers act as gamers who lead the libretto characters as avatars. In this way, the performance largely frees itself from the conventional principle of a more precise tracing of the narrative laid out in the libretto and music. Nevertheless, every word sung in Gelsenkirchen was meticulously surtitled. Those who took this as a hook to follow all the conflicts about drugs, boxing and queerness that the plot tells of found little support in the stage action and could only fail in the end. In Bremen, this initially led to the decision not to use surtitles at all. The narrative was thus pushed even further into the background. And while the score clings to the differentiated tonal realisation of every detail of the plot, its effect seemed even more reduced to the character of an intoxicating soundscape of vocal parts and orchestral colours than in Gelsenkirchen. As on other levels of the performance, it was far more about ‘immersion’ than understanding.

Between narration and non-narration, the conflicting poles of this production, a balance now seems to have been found in Darmstadt that does not eliminate the contradictions of antagonistic approaches, but balances them against each other and in this way creates a productive tension. The surtitles are back, but they are set more generously, no longer trailing every libretto word every second. The music – certainly not an easy decision – has been shortened by several passages, freeing the performance from the ballast of some peripheral and barely transportable content within this theatre, which aims to tell rather than capture. In return, the gamers merge a little more with their avatars, and the opera plot is transferred to them more strongly. In Darmstadt, you don’t know where you actually are, in the computer game or in the underground club, and this uncertainty is transferred to the visitors not as a shortcoming, but as the inextricability of simultaneous levels of reality.

As in the previous theatres, ‘Freedom Collective’ in Darmstadt will be presented under the label ‘immersive music theatre’. Such a claim was already made in the project application at the time: theatre-goers should not be viewers of the stage action, but become part of it. Above all, the director focussed on eliminating the separation of stage and auditorium. The actors should be in the centre of the audience and the audience should be able to move freely. This approach is now opposed by safety regulations in Darmstadt’s large theatre. As the project progressed, the part of the concept that promised immersion in a completely different way faded into the background. Theatre was to be expanded to include new media, and key content additions were to be available on a mobile phone app during the performance. A lot of work was put into this app, which was developed especially for this production by SWR’s Experimentalstudio. Nevertheless, in the end it lacked the flexibility to be used in more diverse ways and ultimately to be much more than a gadget that had little influence on the dramaturgy and perception of the performance.

So how much remains ‘immersive’ in Darmstadt? A course leads the audience from the foyer first in front of the closed iron curtain and from there later onto the stage with a now reversed view into the stalls – not an entirely new effect, but still an effective one for questioning the theatre as a machine of illusion. From this moment on, with three quarters of the performance still to go, ‘Freedom Collective’ becomes veritable peep-box theatre. If it weren’t otherwise on the programme – so what? you might ask. The characterisation has been refined compared to earlier stages; the depth of the space is played with effectively; the 3D animations appear to be effectively expanded with additional material; a clever lighting direction sets caesuras based on the music and Darmstadt’s lighting department is allowed to sparkle with all the lighting technology a theatre like this has. The audience appears impressed after the end of the performance. However, they frown at the mobile phones during the opening night discussions. Due to the expectations that were fuelled here, but hardly fulfilled, some people felt a little teased. Should they have decided to throw the mobile phones out last? Then there would have been little left of the concept that the NOperas! jury had chosen.

Before a favourable review appeared in the FAZ after some delay, the press did not mean well by the performance. Unlike Helga and Horst, critics try to inform themselves thoroughly before attending the performance, read explanations of the libretto content and also read the magic word ‘immersive’. They hardly find enough of either in the performance and, misguided in their criteria, they then do the maths. But if the Experimental Music Theatre Fund is right to bear its name, the end is always open. Wherever the aim is to facilitate ‘piece development’, pre-announcements run the risk that everything will turn out quite differently from what was initially envisaged. Many of the announcements about ‘Freedom Collective’ have long been published in annual magazines. Others, which fuelled false expectations right up to the end, could have been avoided – we will probably have to be more careful here in future.

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Successful premiere of “Freedom Collective” at the MiR. Where have we got to from my point of view?

Davor Vincze’s score is certainly the most challenging that the theatres have ever had to deal with as part of NOperas! Fears that the agreed number of orchestral rehearsals would not be enough were not realised at the MiR: Premil Petrović – as musical director from out of town and also part of the project team – was impressed by the commitment and virtuosity of the Gelsenkirchen musicians after the very first rehearsal. He was equally full of praise for the perfectly cast quartet of four singer-actors. And hats off to the MiR’s sound department for the seamless spatialisation of the sound and for the perfect amalgamation of live musical events and electronic playback.

Davor Vincze has also written by far the most “operatic” NOperas! score to date, including, one is amazed, a love duet that is hardly inferior to Der Rosenkavalier in terms of culinary delights. Pathos and beautiful sound, which for a long time were definitive “no-nos” for composers who did not want to chum up to the music theatre business, are finding new honours. But every sound remains advanced. His music never falls back into the epigonal or harmlessly eclectic. Where is the difference between the real and the unreal, between statement and irony and quotation? I am still struggling with it.

Now, the name of the NOperas! programme includes the word “not” alongside “opera” – it is intended to be about projects that also break new theatrical ground. Projects that, in whatever way, go beyond the traditional narrative of the opera genre. When awarding the project, the jury expected this above all from the concept of using smartphones to involve the audience in the musical theatre experience. In most people’s opinion, this was only partially realised, at least in this first stage of the project at the MiR. For some, their browser got in the way. Those who were “connected” instead hardly experienced anything additional in terms of substance. One woman I spoke to, who must have been barely thirty, even reacted allergically: “I’m going to the theatre to finally get away from this thing, but even here everyone is fiddling with their mobile phones now!” If this complaint is essentially also directed at the NOperas! jury, then the demands to involve the audience as actors in the theatre events already had to be scaled back in the end with “Chaosmos”, the first NOperas! production. The idea of gamifying musical theatre is currently on the minds of many. Rarely have I seen this goal achieved in a convincing way. But Bremen and Darmstadt are still waiting here.

The fact that even the first development stage of “Freedom Collective” fulfils the claim of NOperas! is due to Heinrich Horwitz’s approach of not telling stories in the conventional way. The audience is not tied to seats. Fuzzy Edges separates the stage and, as it used to be called, the “auditorium”. The art form is not that of an opera. It is that of an environment of light, sound and rather symbolically withdrawn theatre action. A meta-level does the trick: the four performers do not embody characters in the play, they are players who lead these characters as avatars. But it is a game, even if it is primarily narrated. Nonetheless, the audience should remain active. Vincze’s score provides support by – a key moment – breaking out of the operatic idiom into electronic dancefloor sounds for an extended period in the middle of the piece. Some let themselves be carried away by the ensemble as animators to rave. Others seemed rather irritated, at least on this premiere evening, barely overcoming their inhibitions about desecrating the MiR’s opera temple in the desired manner.

The evening was sold out and the average age was a good half that of normal opera evenings. A striking example of the fact that music theatre needs new forms and probably also new formats if it wants to reach younger audiences in future. Most of them simply gave in to the pleasure of “media overkill” (Deutsche Bühne). Provided they had realised that the sung text often refers to drugs, they experienced an intoxicating evening even without them. Vincze’s music, however, tells a story with many plot twists at every moment: Who fights whom, who loves, who betrays whom, what happens to whom and why? Others’ eyes are glued to the surtitles, which unintentionally re-establish the usual separation between stage and auditorium, theatre and audience. You try to decipher plot conflicts that are not important to the scene, get stranded in the process and end up feeling fooled.

Rarely have I heard such different voices as after this premiere. It achieved something decisive when it led to such lively discussions. As a NOperas! project, I feel that “Freedom Collective” lives essentially from the deliberate dialectic between Vincze’s revival of genuine operatic drama and Horwitz’s theatrical post-drama. The latter has so far retained the upper hand.

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The new year begins for Dritte Generation Ost with an intensive working retreat at OPER OTZE AXT in Stralsund. Three of the eight come from there, the mother of the two Gawendas gives up her flat and it becomes a NOperas! flat share for a week.

One week of hard work. The daily schedule is rigorously organised. In the mornings, the team splits into smaller groups to work separately on individual areas – libretto, stage, music – and bring them back together in the evening in a plenary session. Additional funding organisations apart from feXm are also researched; the plan is for the project to continue to develop after the end of its three NOperas! phases and to be able to find additional performances, especially in the East.

During the last two working days, I join the feXm as dramaturge. Outside it’s freezing cold and the sky is bright blue, in the Gawenda flat there are overflowing ashtrays and thick clouds of tobacco.
A number of fundamental ideas have emerged during these days.

OPER OTZE AXT is roughly based on the real life story of Dieter “Otze” Ehrlich. It should remain inspired by his story. It should remain inspired by Ehrlich’s story without retelling it in detail and without laying claim to historical truth. Under no circumstances should it follow in the footsteps of the well-written personality musicals à la Lindenberg, Bowie or Abba.

Basic stages: Otze as a non-conformist, his rebellion, his conflict with state power and his secret pact with it when he becomes an informer for the Stasi. Otze then in the united Federal Republic of Germany: he slips into drugs, he kills his father.

Somewhere hidden in this story are questions about the relationship between the GDR and the new unified Germany. About the so-called “Wende” years, about the punk movement in East and West. And, of course, questions about the concept and idea of freedom. “Break what breaks you!” sang Ton, Steine, Scherben at the time. “Why don’t you break yourself!” was the title of a song by Dieter Ehrlich.
Although DDO has an equal number of male and female members, these two days are all about the male world. Of tough guys who get into heroic fights and get drunk, conspiratorially building their amplifiers somewhere to shout out their frustration in the closed-off world of the punk community.

Three protagonists emerge: Otze, his father and the collective of a many-faced and therefore all the more faceless conformist outside world – as character masks and voice leaders of the “Germany” system (first East, then East-West), individual figures can emerge from it, only to immediately fall back into it again. In any case, women do not seem to play a decisive role in Othete’s world. To be Oedipus, Otze has so far lacked Iocaste.

How does music theatre that refers to punk go together with classically trained opera voices and the instruments of a classical orchestra?
The key figure should be that of the father, conceived as a person who is always present but always silent. He is surrounded by the absence of sound. Silence is one of the most powerful means of musical expression at the moment of the general pause. Rebellion through noise and sound, on the other hand, characterises the son. While he cries out in vain for dialogue with his father, both are speechless in their own way. The idiom of the opera is then parodically set against them both as that of a West-Eastern petty bourgeoisie trapped in musical clichés.

It is above all this musical dramaturgy that has so far provided a more precise interpretation of the Otze parable. A play, therefore, about the speechlessness of an all-German society. A play also about the changed continuation of the parental conflict of 1968 into the 1980s.

While the revolt of the 1960s was as optimistic in its belief in the possibility of a better life as it was saturated with language and theory, after the collapse of all this hope, after the end of the Prague Spring in the East, the RAF and the Red Brigades in the West in the later Honecker era, which was also the era of Kohl, Reagan and Thatcher, all that remained was the language- and theory-less feeling of a last dance on the Titanic. In “contemporary music”, all binding systems disintegrated during this period. Pop is indulging in gloomy, plaintive songs. Punk cries out against the world without being able or even wanting to show a better one. Only the Gorbi shouts put an end to the general feeling of no future. But in Kohl’s blossoming landscape, the AfD is thriving today.

Two jury meetings are needed to decide on the next NOperas! project based on the applications. As always, a group of finalists was selected in the first session, who then had a month to contact the participating theatres, ask more detailed questions about the opportunities available there, and concretise their own plans in more detail, in order to then face each other face-to-face in a more in-depth discussion in the second session.

As is almost always the case, this time the decision remained difficult until the last moment. “Oper Otze Axt” is the name of the project that won the race. The collective responsible for the production is called “Dritte Degeneration Ost”.

“Oper Otze Axt” is inspired by the life of Erfurt punk musician Dieter “Otze” Ehrlich and his band “Schleimkeim”, which was part of the musical underground of the GDR. The team convinced the jury, among other things, by placing its particular view of the German-German problem against the backdrop of the reunification years, provocatively generalising the question of the nature of freedom beyond this context and thus making an intelligent thematic contribution to pressing contemporary issues within the framework of musical theatre.

“Dritte Degeneration Ost” is not only the largest collective (eight people share artistic responsibility), but also the youngest to be awarded the feXm contract. The name satirises the attempts to come to terms with German-German history by the “Dritte Generation Ost” (Third Generation East) network and association. Almost all of the team come from the “new federal states” and link their project to coming to terms with their personal experiences. But even more than the “Third Generation”, the “Third Degeneration” belongs to the post-reunification period, looking at the time from the perspective of an experience that is still close enough to be of personal interest, but distant enough to create a new historical perspective.

The word “reality” is replaced by “realities” in the play description written by the team. There is no longer just one. More or less assuming that it is hopeless or perhaps simply no longer a question of separating the true from the false in the conventional way, of recognising the idea of multiple realities.

Each person should experience their own piece in this “immersive” music theatre. Everyone should be able to move freely through the theatre in a space that is both stage and auditorium at the same time, thus eliminating their conventional separation.

Everyone should drift between different interpretations of the plot, none of which is more correct than the other.

Immersion, however, proves to be a difficult exercise when it comes to musical theatre with highly complex music and a correspondingly traditional orchestral set-up. The rehearsal in Gelsenkirchen was also aimed at solving such problems. The spaces in the three participating theatres are different. Magdalena Emmerig has created flexible room elements that can be adapted to the respective circumstances. The opera directors and technical departments of all the theatres involved had travelled to Gelsenkirchen. For them, Gelsenkirchen also became a kind of test case. Would it be possible to find solutions here that would bring everything under one roof for them too?

Screens dominate our lives for years. Corona has multiplied the trend: Zoom conferences have taken the place of city trips or even travel, Netflix has replaced theatre visits, virtual sex in 3D has replaced real contact tracing. Theatre is a space of physicality. Screens will also define “Freedom Collective” – large ones in the auditorium, small ones on the mobile phones involved in the performance. But visitors will become co-actors. They will not only have to move around the space, but will also be challenged to perform their own “physical” actions on their mobile phones and ultimately experience a split world of feeds (also on a musical level) and live events.

The sound technology involved – the famous SWR experimental studio, without which the works of Luigi Nono, among others, would not have been possible – will probably not always make it possible to recognise which sound is coming from where. All the more, however, it seems to be about the tension between what is mediated and what is experienced as “live”.

So aren’t there perhaps criteria by which we can filter the jumble of divergent “experiences of reality”?

2 June: Premiere of “Fundstadt” in Bremen / 16 June: Premiere in Gelsenkirchen. The reviewer of the Bremer Kreiszeitung describes the performance as “magical”. Fundstadt’s claim to “let us see the world through a child’s eyes”, he says, initially seems “a bit kitschy”. One of its greatest assets is that it has escaped all kitsch. Just as the team met the children involved at eye level, so now does the audience. The “beings” that the six children invented for themselves as companions appear threatened in quite a few cases. “They want to break you” says Ali to his, which he hides in a shoe box. He promises him to protect it. “The truth is not always the most beautiful” speaks the voice of a girl from Bremen from offstage (most of the time she is downright “disgusting”). She wants to become a veterinarian. But what if an animal got into trouble and a friend needed her help at the same time? There would then be no right thing to do. So she has decided to do without friends in her life. Salvation is not one of these children’s worlds.

Where sound does not oppose the visual in music theatre, it runs the risk of becoming bogged down in the subconscious. The six films do not escape this either. In front of the film image, the music liquefies into a soundtrack in places, although it deserves to be heard more consciously. The live actions, created by children and instrumentalists, compensate for this. Their visual and sound memory motifs bring back the images and sounds of the film.

The six filmic portraits of children remain the same in both cities. Three in each city link directly to the place where they are seen. The live actions differ only slightly as such in both cities, but change their character with different spatial placement. The surfaces of shimmering gold paper – they refer to film in a shoebox – seem lively in the Gelsenkirchen sunshine, magical in the Bremen pedestrian tunnel.

The short finale, in which the live children interact with the audience, took place in Bremen in the theatrical atmosphere of the Brauhaus stage there. Colourful light illuminated irregularly placed crumpled chairs. If in Gelsenkirchen one had been one of the first to finish one’s way, in the upper foyer of the MiR one encountered thirty cots arranged in a strict row, as if Beuys had been reborn to counterpoint Yves Klein’s wall space. The irritation of “what is actually theatre here and what perhaps simply belongs to the world” (Bremer Kreiszeitung) was not resolved here, but symbolically heightened once again by the wide view through the glass window of Gelsenkirchen as a found city. When thirty people then lay lined up on the cots, they appeared like the wounded in a military hospital. Children appeared above them as doctors. They looked up at them from their cots and the little ones were suddenly the big ones. One after the other, they turned their attention to each patient, exchanging a glance with him through a hand mirror.

“Fundstadt” is in the middle of the final spurt and “Freedom Collective” is picking up speed. Often in May or June, two feXm production teams find themselves at the same venue. While HIATUS is working on the rehearsal stage of the MiR, a few rooms away the departments meet for the first conversation with the people from “Freedom Collective”. Heinrich (director) and Magdalena (stage) were still in Bremen yesterday, Darmstadt will follow next week. The idea is that the audience should be able to move freely during the performance. Each stage offers different constraints, each also different possibilities. The idea is that the audience will be able to hear equally well from everywhere – and this will require a lot of effort on the part of the sound departments. In addition, there is the challenge of the smartphone network, which provides additional input to what is happening on stage. The orchestra line-up has been fixed in the meantime. The final determination of the vocal parts is now pending. All the theatres should be able to cast the vocal parts from their own ensembles, if possible; guests will hit the production team’s own budget. Within the team, the staging has to be balanced with the music. Davor (composition) answers from Lyon, where he is spending the first of his two weeks at GRAME (Générateur de ressources et d’activités musicales exploratoires) and is already busy working on the level of electronic feeds.