Unchained Melody
For his Opéra Concrète, Alexander Fahima staged a Berlin community for 15 hours during a house party and streamed the music theater ‘Rules of Attraction’ live on Twitch. In an interview with the Deutsche Bank Academy Music Theater Now, he talks about his first online opera.
Alexander Fahima, ‘Rules of Attraction’ is your first opera conceived for the Internet. How did you get into doing a live stream music theater?
AF: At the end of 2020 I received an invitation to develop a production for the series Next Waves Theater at Volksbühne Berlin. The project by AMH alumnus Tilman Hecker, Belle Santos and Selin Davasse was a kind of laboratory for new digital performance formats. It became clear to me very early that I would be exploring the field of music theater and that I’d like to take the opportunity to show what new freedoms and responsibilities arise when opera is exposed to the very different attention economics of the Internet.
In addition, I wanted to create an artistic portrait of a Berlin community for a long time. These are about 20 young queer artists who have come to Berlin from all over the world in recent years and whom I met in the summer of 2020. For Next Waves Theater I had the idea of staging these friends during a house party and - since we found ourselves in the middle of the corona pandemic - streaming the whole thing live. The special feature of ‘Rules of Attraction’ is that the music theater consists of a single plan sequence in which the community films itself with smartphones during the whole event. This video recording strictly follows the three Aristotelian unities: it shows a specific group of people in only one limited place, which is filmed continuously over a reasonable period of time. The resulting audiovisual narrative, in which I combine such a video document in real time with an opera including the complete subtitling of the libretto, I call an Opéra Concrète.
For ‘Rules of Attraction’ you chose Richard Wagner's ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ and staged the work, which is usually never performed in one piece, in its entirety for 15 hours. Why this composition?
For 14 years now, since I directed my first music theater production, I treated opera as a material. In other words, I introduce the audience to my very personal perception of the exhibited object ‘opera'. Like a curator, I place different materials alongside it’s appearance or create an experiential space around it; by applying the composition and its performance and not just telling the stories differently. For ‘Rules of Attraction’ I was looking for a piece that provided enough music and drama to last a house party, but also had the necessary weight for such a demanding approach. The ‘Ring des Nibelungen’ seemed ideal to me. It is a magnificent composition with a huge architecture - due to its sheer length and ramified narrative. Above all, the piece is rich of individual aspects, layers and profundity that open up countless possibilities for remixing or contrasting. During the performance, we almost felt like squatters entering the palace - all in awe.
What was special about directing the live performance?
In ‘Rules of Attraction’, everyone involved is also their own producer by filming themselves, staging themselves and thereby making this music theater visible to the audience from their own perspective. For the 15-hour performance, I developed various individual situations parallel to the ‘Ring des Nibelungen’ and knew, for example, at 5 past midnight the third act of the ‘Walküre’ starts with the Ride of the Valkyries.
And yet such a total work of art is difficult to plan completely, because in the progress of the party a momentum develops of its own - the creativity of each individual is stimulated by dancing and celebrating - and that's how it should be. I've never had a production before where I could say so little in advance about what's going to happen; but where I knew I could fully rely on the creative space we arranged so thoughtfully. But that is what's so exciting and fulfilling when I think of a production as bigger than just what I want to see at the end. That's how I conceive my work in general. You can see the stage direction here as game instructions; I set the rules for a game, which the performers then transfer to the stage and the audience watches them play, which is a great moment of pleasure.
Speaking of the stage – to what extent do you leave the classic stage situation with your digital opera and with what effect?
This Opéra Concrète was designed to be performed only once and not to be repeated. Many of my friends tried to watch the 15 hour performance in its entirety, stayed up all night but fell asleep in between and then continued watching intermittently just to check on us. But I also deliberately played with that: on one hand there was the camera, which was producing images non-stop, and on the other hand the viewer's eye, which at some point was simply exhausted. Right from the start, I wanted it to be a lively stage that was open to the point of physical exhaustion, literally unleashed. And that can also be seen as an opposition to Wagner’s pursuit of the perfect illusion.
The other aspect is that by using the camera you can also follow the sound of the music differently and get a new visual-aesthetic impression of the ‘Ring des Nibelungen’. When I am in an opera house and see the performance, I only have one perspective from my seat and therefore only one auditory impression. This is completely resolved in an Opéra Concrète with the ever-changing camera perspectives. By playfully activating the sense of orientation, very diverse levels of understanding are offered - and Wagner's music is also experienced surprisingly unbiased.
What is the future of such digital formats? Who does this appeal to and how can more digital opera formats be developed?
Shortly after the first wave of the pandemic, there was a boom in digital productions or live streams. However, the use of the camera often seemed very inexperienced. Mainly because most of the theaters and opera houses do not yet have people who are trained and responsible for such technologies. In the case of digital productions, however, a unique artistic visual language must be developed.
Future digital and hybrid opera productions are becoming really interesting when proper positions are created in the theaters and the art of cinematography, VR/AR visualization and 3D animation finds its way into creative process of the production - and is no longer perceived as just a side issue. The question that arises, however, is whether digital formats must inevitably happen in a traditional opera house and what would be other venues for them, especially if such productions are not aimed at an audience that wants to experience classic Personenregie. Hopefully there will be more ventures like the Next Waves Theater successor Glasshouse, which as far as I know is still the only platform for digital performances in Germany.
Read the original article by Jennifer Endro on www.akademie-musiktheater-heute.de