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.
