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.
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.
Technical navel-gazing: alongside lift doors and the hissing of heating pipes, the trickling of water rivulets is captured using contact microphones. (Photo: Antonia Beeskow)
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.
© Dritte-Degeneration-Ost
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”.
At the signal of a siren, a gate opens and the Eloi move in a trance into the maw hidden behind it, where they are eaten by the Morlocks. No one is eaten in Darmstadt, but the scene is similar to George Pal's ‘Time Machine’ (1960) when, after a long time in the auditorium, the iron curtain rises and the audience begins its journey into the depths of the stage.
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.
rq
The composition team1 meets for the first time in the spring-like capital.
On the first evening, of course, it’s off to the pub, where else to go with all the happiness!
We discuss the first libretto drafts and look for suitable forms of expression, tonal conceptual equivalents to the story.
Opera, the conservative, the established music system. Noise as a call for freedom, punk as a sledgehammer. We want to deconstruct opera.
We discuss experimental approaches to the voice,
Diamanda Gallas.
Chainsaw Man too.
The transition from sound to voice reminds us of Hermeto Pascual and we imagine inviting him and his flow into our piece.
But already dead! What a pity!
The transition from sound to voice as a psychological process. The Electronic Voice Phenomenon could enable us to make the transition from radio noise to spoken voices and chants.
How can spoken language be composed, tonalised, modulated or rhythmised?
How can we create interesting forms of audience participation?
The attempt to compose as a foursome is also new territory for us.
We want to use songs, classical composition, electronic soundscapes and the noisiness of our stage objects.
After the meal, we show Richard various songs from agitprop and begin to develop initial sketches from them.
Overall, we realise that we see the libretto as a collection of material.
A scene plan will serve as the basis for our composition, which we want to finalise in the large group over the next few weeks.
Theatrical elements, psychology, text, music and objects are to be given equal weight in the development process.
We don’t want to establish an artistic hierarchy of a department. This is time-consuming and small-scale, but we trust that something that transcends us all can grow from the diversity of all the voices in our group.
The next joint appointment on site, in addition to endless Zoom meetings, will be the first viewing of the stage design at the end of May in Kassel.
There we can finally start to move from theory to action.
1 Richard Grimm, Mathias Baresel, Antonia Beeskow
Nayun Lea Kim not in the role of the "Fan", but in the role of the gamer of the "Fan" avatar. Photo: Sascha Kreklau
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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