Film

When Corona brought the theatrical development of “Chaosmos” to a halt, the creative work nevertheless did not stand still. Before this finally led to the large-scale cinematic development of “Chaosmos – the Film”, smaller film works dealt with the situation of that time. Through them, one finds oneself transported back to the ghostly atmosphere of those days.

Locked at home after having to break off rehearsals in Halle during the chaos of the Corona lockdown, Konrad Kästner found himself thrown into an obsessive search for order within the walls of his own small appartment.

Another product of the Corona Lockdown. When tenor Robert Sellier from Oper Halle sent this clip to the production team as an encouragement not to give up, the rehearsals had come to a halt – no one knew yet that they would never resume. Robert can be seen here confronted with difficutlies while trying to interprete an excerpt of Marc Sinan’s score privately at home. This film remains the only testimony of all of the efforts that the Halle ensemble has put into “Chaosmos”.

Music theater is a complex art form. Only the smallest part of a theater is taken up by stage and auditorium, and for a performance to work, far more participants are needed than the audience gets ever to see. What if the perfectly organized order system of the theater suddenly no longer serves the performance, but only itself? Lacking his ensemble, Kästner filmed the shutdown of the Halle Opera during the first days of the lockdown.

In a kind of mash-up, “Kitesh” confronted the music of Rimsky-Korsakov with newly composed sounds by Alexander Chernyshkov. “Downfall of a Saint” is an independent composition by Chernyshkov, created for this occasion. In Halle it found its place in the foyer, in Bremen on the roof of the theater. As a takeout from “Kitesh”, the film, which is shot in B/W, documents the Halle performance with Michale Zehe on guitar and vocals and Yvan Li on percussion.

For the farewell festival of Florian Lutz’s team at Oper Halle, “Hauen und Stechen” produced a cinematic meditation of their theatre piece. The film collages different elements of the stage production into a the visual logic of nightmare and wishful dream.

“Freedom Collective” represents a continued development of a twenty-minute predecessor project, which, directed by Heinrich Horwitz and performed by the Hamburg-based Ensemble Decoder, took the form of a film in 2022. The project is still about boxing and a fictitious drug called “XinSheng” (a word that means “new life” in Mandarin). Concept and plot, however, have since gone through several further stages.