Becoming a mushroom
The development of a music theater production has something of a detective work: traces found are scrutinized in their relationship to each other. What is at the beginning of your examination of the art form of opera?
For me as the final instance that brings everything together, it is an ever new dialogue with the texts I am confronted with: libretto and music. Even in this case, where I could have talked to the librettists and the composer, I was not concerned with the question of what they were thinking. I don't follow the tracks back like a profiler in order to be able to recreate an act, I don't want to arrest anyone. It was about a research that I fed through logic and fantasy, and this bundle of information met the bodies of the performers who brought their own fantasies and their theatrical techniques. Because opera is not what is announced in the opera guide, but what happens on stage evening after evening, with the participation of the audience. And that's changeable: You experience a Carmen differently when you've eaten greasy than when it's snowing outside.
Through the transparent film, which is an essential part of the stage design, ‘the act of seeing’ itself is addressed - by temporarily distorting, overwriting, questioning the gaze at the people behind it.
This is an extremely exciting cultural tool that can be observed on social media: Through texts, stickers, doodles on pictures, a complex sort of communication begins to happen between the various layers whose hierarchies change permanently. I used to play with obstruction of sight (or what I call seduction through anti-focus) in former productions such as In Between at Philharmonie de Paris and Mahagonny-Songspiel at Baden-Baden Festival, but here it layed the fundament for a whole new way of storytelling. This will be as important for me in the future as my Opéra Concrète and I will pay special attention to the further development of these two inventions.
How did you come up with the motifs that can be seen on this upstream layer? You drew them yourself in weeks of work.
The drawings were not made according to a template - there was no reason to force an imagery. I was alone with the material, acrylic and polyethylene, and limited to the motion range of my body. I followed the measure that he gave, therefore I was able to act in an instinct-controlled, animal way. If I couldn't go on anymore, I had to shift my weight or change the direction. Thus, other forms have emerged from mere parallel strokes. Nothing was caused by an aesthetics decisions. The inner mushroom flourished. I could let it happen, so my head was free again; and since it was constantly looking for thoughts to play, it probably subconsciously remembered one or the other image that it had developed the months before during my research.
The drawings seem to me like the smallest living beings under the microscope or like excavated remains of civilisation that signal to me: There was a human being here.
Or rather: There was a mushroom here. A large part of us already reacts before any thinking begins.
Has the stage action changed by the result of the drawing process?
During rehearsals, I decided not to make direct contact between the drawings on the foil and the performers. We tried this, but it suddenly seemed too loud to me, as pointed at with the finger. That the different layers have something to do with each other happens automatically, but as an individual achievement of our head, while watching.
The freedom of playing, again - only this time from the perspective of the audience.
I'm never interested in rehearsing with a concrete idea of ‘that's how it should look’. I am putting the players on stage in a certain 'flow' (in the sense of gaming) which then is adopted by the audience. In this way, the viewers are enabled to fill every apparent gap or void, every shadow or blind spot that open up with their own imagination, logic or memory.
The conversation was conducted by Martin Mutschler, Artistic Director of the Junge Oper Stuttgart on the occasion of the world premiere of ICARO in November 2023.
Image ©Matthias Baus