01.06.2023 – Tunnel oracle in Bremen

NOperas! sets itself the task of bringing forms and ways of a new music theatre to the municipal theatre. However, the operations there are still geared solely to classical music theatre narrative forms. The interviews in Wiebke Pöpel’s film documentation of the last NOperas! project beautifully illustrate not only the irritations that this always brings for both sides, the municipal theatre and the actors of the independent scene, but also the necessity for mutual adaptation and learning from each other. How can orchestral musicians and children work together if the orchestra union only allows working hours when children are either at school or in bed for the night? This was the problem faced by “Fundstadt“. No one can be ordered to perform such services. Everything can only succeed through individual persuasion and a willingness to generously navigate past the existing rules.

At the main rehearsal in Bremen yesterday, many of the musicians and children posted around the city found only an astonished and at the same time uncomprehending audience of random passers-by. A mistake had crept into the sequence of photos that were supposed to serve as signposts for the actual test audience on their tablets – more than half were soon wandering disoriented through the city past the stations. In such situations, the theatre adheres to the firm belief that it is not a good omen for the premiere if final rehearsals go too smoothly. They fiddled with the tablets until four in the morning, and today at the dress rehearsal they all found their way. The golden apparition who met me in the pedestrian tunnel pushed me against the wall and then informed me (in a child’s voice): “I know everything, EVERYTHING about you!”. Everything really? Oh God! Little reassuring then was the further information: “You will die a VERY cruel death!” The gold being, Uta Plate then told me, pulling out her correction slip, had not been instructed to address me in such a nightmarish way. I advised her not to intervene. The tunnel sibyl had nothing nice in store for my companion either: “You’ll spill your coffee tomorrow morning!” In any case, misfortune remains relative! For tomorrow, we can only hope for a change in the November temperatures in Bremen.

Fundstadt enters the final spurt. The production team described this project in its application as an “urban topography of two cities from the perspective of children from socially different backgrounds”. Three children each from Gelsenkirchen and Bremen have worked and continue to work intensively on the project. In the meantime, they have all invented their own “thing” equipped with essential features, which according to their specifications is now being built in the workshops. Together with musical patrons from the respective orchestras, they have also composed the “thing song” assigned to their thing, which is now being recorded by instrumentalists from the orchestras in various chamber music formations. Each of the children will have their own station on the path that the audience will have to travel. The six children themselves, their objects and things will be components of the digital events, which will be called up at these stations via tablets. Along the way, you will also encounter live musical theatre actions, for which other children and other orchestra musicians have come together. One of the six film children is Jason. Hiatus wrote the following email to the Gelsenkirchen performers inside of his thing:

“Dear Mariana Hernández González,
dear Istvan Karacsonyi, Gioele Coco, Rainer Nörenberg, Uwe Rebers,
you are the DINGLied ensemble of Jason, we are happy to be able to experience you! Jason’s being is a creature from another planet made of red sand. It has four hands, two human ones, two crab claws, and on its head it once again wears bones to protect it from attacks. It can walk up walls and run upside down on the ceiling, it can make itself big and small, shoot lightning. Its favourite food is stinky socks. In the film, Jason virtually creates his own world. He starts in an empty white room and sets up his workspace in a garage, building his own solar system. One day he comes back to his studio in the garage and finds it transformed. There his being appears to him. Jason does not know whether his world has continued to build itself in his absence and thus the being has come into being, or whether the being has continued to build secretly. In the last music meeting with Jason, we laid the foundation for Jason’s DINGLied with the help of Jason’s fantastic “music godfather” Istvan Karacsonyi. Jason invented music patterns with the nine planets of our solar system. There are also settings by Istvan of the creature’s superpowers (see appendix for an example). The music will build up gradually in analogy to Jason’s film story.”

Duri Collenberg has developed a playing score for Jason’s Dinglied, the various parts of which are appended to the letter – below here: the notes for 1st oboe.

The project for the 2023/24 season has been fixed since October, and now finally its definitive title – “Freedom Collective”. Since December, the more precise plot outline has been in the making. For his preliminary compositional study (still titled “XinSheng”), Davor Vincze, together with Rama Gottfried and Andrés Nuño de Buen, received the renowned annual Stuttgart Composition Prize last weekend. More than 150 compositions had been submitted as applications. The three prize-winning pieces, which were premiered at the closing concert of the Stuttgart Eclat Festival, could hardly have been more different – Nuño de Buen’s guitar quartet: spare, restrained, almost hermetic; Gottfried’s “Scenes from the Plastisphere”: playful and open in form; “Xinsheng”: culinary, refined, with tonal delicacy and a grand gesture that does not shy away from the operatic. The ensemble Mosaik played with clarinet, cello, keyboard, percussion and (yes, this instrument really exists:) electric zither; Nina Guo sang. The sold-out auditorium applauded. We eagerly await the further progress.

Musical theatre companies are highly specialised businesses, set up in all their processes for the classical opera form. Every NOperas! production creates challenges, and the most difficult ones can arise when they affect the orchestra. Children are supposed to work on compositions together with orchestra musicians in “Fundstadt”, but in the mornings children are at school, in the evenings they are asleep, and in the afternoons, as the union wants, musicians are not allowed to work, even if they want to. After a lengthy tug-of-war, this problem is now also off the table. Also, the performers of both orchestras are now in place.
During two workshops in Gelsenkirchen and Bremen last year, HIATUS recruited the six children around whose lives, dreams, hopes and self-composed orchestral music “Fundstadt” revolves. While other children will be involved in the theatre action, these six will only appear for the audience on the tablet feeds. In a second workshop phase, it was not only a matter of entering the life worlds of these six “film children”. Uta Plate and Duri Collenberg write:

“Our stay in Gelsenkirchen and in Bremen during the last two weeks was predominantly marked by the encounters with people with whom we will be, and in some cases already are, immersed in the artistic, content-related work for “Fundstadt”.
o The children: We visit all six film children individually, they take us on a long walk through their everyday lives. This leads from family to school, from religion to leisure, from the visible to the imagined.
o The musicians: There is a first personal conversation with colleagues from the Bremen Philharmonic Orchestra and the New Philharmonic Orchestra of Westphalia. In March, the work of developing the music begins; many ways have to be tried out in order to get from the children’s ideas of sound to a form that can be realised by orchestral musicians. The instrumentalists involved are to be involved in this process from now on.
o The people around the theatre in Bremen and Gelsenkirchen: With the filmmaker Aaike Stuart we visit places to which the walks with the children have led us. There are first tests of film sets, small test shoots with the children. For the route of our walk, we then find places near the theatre that are representative of the everyday and fantasy episodes of the film children as “stations” of the audio-video walk. In the process, we have spontaneous, wonderfully sympathetic meetings with local residents, petrol station owners, garage owners, directors of an old people’s home, whose participation will enrich the diversity of the stations of the walk and the film recordings.”

Independent theatre and music theatre ensembles in Germany usually work under precarious conditions. With the existing funding institutions, they shimmy from one project application to the next. Rarely is the funding then high enough to allow more than two or three performances in the end. The amount of work and the number of performances are hardly in a meaningful relationship and many a project would have more than deserved to reach a larger number of spectators.

The Netherlands and Belgium show that things can be done differently. Those who receive funding there receive it over several projects, so they are structurally secure and can plan for the longer term. Funded groups perform their plays not only a few times at the premiere venue, but tour with them across the many stages of the country, because unlike in Germany, these stages are not staffed with their own ensembles.

This has an impact on the aesthetic forms that music theatre takes there. After all, projects have to function not only in front of a smaller ingroup, which is usually the audience in Germany, but in front of a much larger group of an audience that is interested but by no means specialised in contemporary music. On the other hand, a much larger audience than in Germany is socialised with new forms of music theatre.

The cooperation of several theatres within the NOperas! programme tries to create synergies that compensate to some extent for the dilemma of local funding structures. However, productions do not move from one stage to another as completed projects, but at the same time find the opportunity for further development. Just how worthwhile this can be was already evident last summer with the further development of “Kitesh” in Bremen and now also with the second station of the “Obsessions” project in Wuppertal.

The decisive factor for the changed stage effect that “Obsessions” has now acquired in Wuppertal is the enlarged space in which the individual with his or her actions appears more isolated and therefore more emphasised. At the same time, the spatial distance to the audience is also greater in Wuppertal. This makes the stage action seem much more pictorial than in Bremen.

The new performers in Wuppertal each fill out the basic concept developed and adopted in Bremen in a new way. Whereas in Bremen it was easy to distinguish between actors, singers and members of the Oblivia ensemble in terms of the type and quality of their respective physical actions, the performers now form a much more cohesive ensemble that works on a homogeneous common basis.

Oblivia’s working method is similar in some ways to that of Pina Bausch, and even though this choreographed theatre is quite different, at the premiere Wuppertal seems to have remembered the old days. There was great and sustained applause.

Over five days in October, HIATUS worked with groups of children from Bremen and Gelsenkirchen to develop “sound-image ideas”. Designed as independent, self-contained events, these workshops now serve in a second step to select and recruit three children from each of the cities who will then also be at the centre of the performance of “Fundstadt”. According to the HIATUS method, finding and inventing sounds is closely linked to the visual and pictorial, specifically at the MiR to a “finding of faces”. Here HIATUS document their work process in Gelsenkirchen:

“We enter the field with the following question: In what form can we make the possibilities of music available as a space for working and experimenting?
And with this, the first co-composition methods with children become concrete. In the workshop, the children’s research begins with three focal points:

• Looking inwards to one’s own perceptions, memories, dreams.
• Perceiving other players.
• Grasping the environment in public space.

At the end of the workshop week, the performances of our “Wesenslieder” will take place at different locations around the MiR, bringing these three aspects together in the form of a sound performance. This is what the “Pareidolie Game” leads to, a process laid out over two days. In the first step, the children go out and find “faces” of beings in buildings, trees, traffic signs, etc. in public space. At these places they make sound recordings that capture the ambient sounds and some site-specific conspicuous sounds. In addition, each child plays the “creature location” like an instrument (e.g. scratching in the gravel, knocking on the garage door, etc.). With all these recordings, we build a sampler instrument for each being: each time a key is pressed on a small piano keyboard, a different sound is heard.
Our common starting point of finding “faces of beings” in public space and then giving them expression through sounds led the children to the possibility of experimenting with a sampler and combining their own recordings as building blocks to create “instant compositions”.
On the last day, the children perform with the sampler on their “beings”. We experience different performances:

• A concert with an audience.
• A duet between sampler sounds and another child responding with live sounds.
• The performance of a theatrical improvisation task that lets the children interact with the surrounding space.”

“Obsessions” is now entering its second round at the Wuppertal Opera. Last week there was a rehearsal, today work began with the soloists, and the premiere is on 3 December.

There was actually nothing to “build” at the rehearsal – the play is performed on an empty stage. According to the original concept, Wuppertal’s revolving stage was to be an essential element of the performance, but after the flooding of the opera house last year it will not be operational for some time. As in Bremen, the instrumentalists are integrated into the stage action: In Bremen’s small house they had to sit at the left side, here, on the large stage, other possibilities arise, several have now been tested visually and acoustically.

Matthieu Svetchine from the Bremen ensemble has come to the Wupper. Apart from him and the actors from Oblivia, these are new actors. The multi-part form that the project took on in Bremen, both musically and theatrically, now serves in Wuppertal as a basic grid to be filled anew with the Wuppertal performers’ own input. So for the newcomers, too, it is now a matter of deriving individual theatrical actions from the improvisational preoccupation with the theme of “obsessions”.

It cannot be just a “rehearsal” because of the completely different dimensions of the stage space. Wuppertal’s stage is now not only much wider, but also much deeper, which, unlike in Bremen, suggests thinking in terms of foreground and background. The number of instrumentalists has increased, but the number of performers remains the same – the individual is much less absorbed into the group in this larger space, so individual actions appear more prominent, more exposed.

Yran Zhao has reworked her composition to suit the larger ensemble and at the same time created a new system of notation. Through more flexible instructions, the musical performance should be able to be adapted to the scenic even more than in Bremen.

Every year, the applications to NOperas! show that the independent scene is overflowing with ideas for new music theatre. Immersive concepts in particular are currently booming among the applications. Many of the projects submitted would have deserved to find their way to the City Theatre this year as well. Accordingly, the jury had a hard time deciding this time as well. After an additional (and thus third) jury meeting, the project for the 2024/24 season has now been decided: it bears the working title “XinSheng”. The production team consists of Davor Vincze (music), Aleksandar Hut Kono (text), Heinrich Horwitz (direction), Magdalena Emmerig (stage design), Premil Petrović (music director), Therese Menzel (production manager).

The Chinese word xīn shēng (新生) points to the sphere of association of regeneration and new life. Here it stands for a fictional drug that promises an increase in energy in the competitive struggle, but has hidden side effects and leads to premature death.

“XinSheng” is an intermedia project in which the live element of stage action is supplemented by digital media on an equal footing. “The piece,” says the application, “aims to sensitise the audience to a semi-dreamy, uncanny state in which everything is confused, loosely defined and slightly contradictory.” The focus is to be on the question of the way in which we construct “reality” from an excess of fragmented and thereby often contradictory information. For a more precise understanding of the plot, the audience is to be dependent on the use of smartphones – but not everyone is to come across the same information here.

Davor Vincze is the winner of several composition prizes. His music is performed by important ensembles for contemporary music (including Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Klangforum Wien). Analogous to the visual level, the musical live performance will also mix real instruments at the moment of sound production and “electronic” instruments from the field of digital playback.

Aleksandar Hut Kono has published two volumes of poetry that have won several prizes in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. He also gained experience in the field of musical theatre with libretti for the US composer Evan Kassof.

Several works have already brought Heinrich Horwitz (they/them/she/her/he/him) together with renowned composers and music ensembles as a choreographer and stage director. Most recently he was responsible for the music theatre “HAUS” with Sarah Nemtsov and Rosa Wernecke at this year’s Ruhrtriennale. He also works continuously as an actor in theatre, film and television.

Typical for the breaking up of conventional professional fields in the field of new music theatre, Magdalena Emmerig‘s work goes beyond her studies as a costume and set designer. In video works and performances, she explores the theatrical potential of digital media and images of gender and femininity. As part of the group “THE AGENCY”, she works on immersive theatre installations.

Premil Petrović is artistic director of the No Borders Orchestra, which he founded in 2012. His first recording with the NBO has been released by Universal Music/Deutsche Grammophon.

The Fonds Experimentelles Musiktheater is looking forward to this new team!

The feXm jury met on 13 September. The venue was the Kunststiftung NRW in Düsseldorf. New to the round was not only the Staatstheater Darmstadt, but also the expert team of Susanne Blumenthal, Rainer Nonnenmann and Moritz Lobeck. Thirty-six applications had to be assessed in advance (the year before there were twenty-nine). Five finalists were chosen after a long day. As always, a few more would have liked to be shortlisted. They are now invited to an in-depth discussion with the jury on 26 September at the NRW KULTURsekretariat.

Among the NOperas! projects to date, “Kitesh” is the most elaborate. As in Halle, all departments in Bremen, which has two NOperas! productions in its repertoire this season, were involved in intensive work. Wisely taking into account that “Kitesh” had been “lying” for a year and a half, Bremen added an additional ten days to the agreed rehearsal time. All the effort, as the premiere shows, has paid off.
Kitesh” still consists of three parts. One in the city space (the audience is divided into groups), one in the foyer (everyone goes their own way) and a third in the traditional situation of the peep-box stage. An armed Hun storm in the stalls and wild escapes in the tiers, however, don’t really let you settle down even there.
In the opera business, whole generations of singers can be channelled through a successful production. The main task of every assistant director is to show the respective new cast ways and actions that have been developed and rehearsed by others. It is therefore better for a director not to make his work too dependent on the external appearance, personality and individuality of his premiere cast. “Hauen und Stechen” have made a name for themselves with a concept that works exactly the other way round and frees the singer-actor from being a puppet. With the largely new cast in Bremen, a new play with changed figures, characters and emphases has emerged.
“Kitesh” in Halle was a spectacle of still roughly hewn building blocks, improvisational lust patched up what was still rather unfinished. Hardly anyone complained that they could hardly follow the plot – the spectacle outweighed that. In Bremen, finer lines were now drawn that made many an interpretative intervention in Rimsky’s opera more comprehensible and wrested a new and perplexing reading from its convoluted reassurance of the afterlife.
Rimsky’s Kitesh opera was premiered in 1916, the same year as Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony. It has many enchantingly beautiful passages, but is hardly free of folkloristic kitsch in others. It is daring to simply orchestrate it downwards, when Rimsky’s much-vaunted strength seems to lie above all in the magic of the orchestral colours. In Halle, my opinion was confirmed that this could hardly go well. In Bremen, I heard it differently. Freed from all wafting and embedded in the contemporary sounds of Alexander Chernikov, Rimsky’s melodic inventiveness now comes to the fore. His music seems quotation-like or folklore, but hardly folkloristic any more.
The elaboration of the almost uninterrupted double action of stage action and simultaneous enlargement of scenic details through the observation of a live camera has also become more precise. When Kitesh sinks, the sinking trench and the film projected over it now interlock in such a way that ahs and oohs can be heard from the audience.
The rush for “Kitesh” was great and so Bremen sold additional tickets for the following performances, despite the crowds that had to be accepted for the first part.
A wind machine caused a red flag to wave while the main rehearsal was still in progress. It changed colour in the main dress rehearsal. What worked in Halle in 2020 suddenly doesn’t work anywhere in Europe. There are people who think that one should not play pieces by Russian composers at the moment. On the contrary, playing them now seems more important than before.