Season 2024/25
Dritte Degeneration Ost
Oper Otze Axt
Concept & libretto: Dritte Degeneration Ost (Baresel / Beeskow / Bickert / Dins / Frieda & Frithjof Gawenda / Grimm / Raschke)
Composition: Richard Grimm
Production: Romy Dins, Frithjof Gawenda
Sound Design & performance: Antonia Alessia Virgina Beeskow
Songwriting & performance: Mathias Baresel
Experimental singing & performance: Frieda Gawenda
Set design: Laurenz Raschke in co-operation with RHO-Kollektiv
Artistic production management: Anne Inken Bickert
Team. The DRITTE DEGENERATION OST (Third Degeneration East) chose its name as an ironic allusion to the East German network ‘3rd Generation East’. With the exception of Czech composer Richard Grimm, its members come from eastern Germany. For them, German-German unification, which is the subject of their project, involves exploring a time in which they were not yet born. Almost all of them have already worked together in the theatre and are now coming together for the first time for this project in the existing constellation and under the existing name. They are focussing on the idea of developing a collective play on an equal footing.
Project. After more than thirty years of German reunification, the seams between East and West are tearing open again and questioning the freedom we have achieved together. Freely inspired by the life of the East German punk musician Dieter Ehrlich, the DRITTE DEGENERATION OST collective questions our understanding of the post-reunification period in its music theatre OPER OTZE AXT and searches for new approaches to explain the increasingly drastic political rifts of our time. The resistant hero of the play experiences the increasingly disintegrating GDR, but finds no redemption in the social liberation of the fall of the Wall and the post-reunification period, only more walls. The music confronts the language of opera with elements of punk.
Initial production: Staatstheater Darmstadt
2nd and 3rd stage of development: Musiktheater im Revier Gelsenkirchen, Theater Bremen
