On the Way - Munich Biennale with handover of baton
Two Swiss co-productions were premiered at the Munich Biennale for New Music Theater 2024.
Since 2016, the curators Daniel Ott and Manos Tsangaris the Munich Biennale through an explicitly articulated openness. Until this year's last edition, both focused on the world's largest premiere festival for music theater, founded by Hans Werner Henze in 1988, as a "forum for young talent". They shortened the duration of the cycles, but increased the number of premieres and the density of performances. This meant regular surprises in terms of locations, subjects and a constantly changing emphasis on artistic means. However, only a few of the co-productions created with theaters and local cultural institutions were staged a second time. The Biennale's yield of experiments without specific objectives, on the other hand, proved to be gigantic and still ensures the festival's international standing. Katrin Beck and Manuela Kerer will be the new management team for the Biennale years from 2026.
When asked about the most successful projects for her personally, Tsangaris named Bernhard Ganders Songs of expulsion and never return based on a libretto by the Ukrainian Serhij Zhadan (2022), Ott the monodrama A portrait of the artist as a dead man by Franco Bridarolli and Davide Carnevali (2018). Both therefore favored work results with political themes. The Biennale mottos therefore always referred to the expanse of present-day topographies and visions of the future: After OmU - Original with subtitles (2016), Privatsache / Private Matter (2018), Point of NEW Return (2020/21) and Good Friends (2022) was held from May 31 to June 10 with On the Way mental, virtual, historical and physical mobility.
The Swiss Ott, founder of the Rümlingen festivalsand Tsangaris, the new president of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, are therefore concluding their era not with a retrospective, but with a utopia. The anthology is resplendent in cold white Snow of tomorrow with "Statements on the music theater of the future". Eloain Lovis Hübner's accumulation of "isms" and "iv"-es is particularly succinct and provides an incommensurable template, which this farewell biennial was obviously happy to take up.
Pessimism, the search for happiness and vegetable soup
Two contributions with Swiss participation showed exemplary poles of contemporary music theater among eleven productions. The triad The new lines belonged Turn Turtle Turn of the Finnish music theater ensemble Oblivia with the Swiss Ensemble ö! under the musical direction of Armando Merino at the Munich City Library. The composition by Chinese composer Yiran Zhao evoked pessimistic associations. To the sonorous groaning from loudspeakers that Turn Turtle Turn InstallationOblivia moved into the center hall with the ö! ensemble for the pieces "Deep Time", "Dark Time" and "And All the Other Times". Yiran Zhao combines Mahlerian melodicism with a brittleness reminiscent of Sondheim. In the end, there is hope for new meaningfulness for human movements through space and time. The audience celebrated this empathy project with warmth.
How's it going, how are things by Andreas Eduardo Frank and Patrick Frank, a co-production with Theater Basel, definitely breaks away from the separation between performance and audience. In fact, for four hours, the audience in the Fat Cat, the former cultural center at the Gasteig, became the main protagonists of a performance somewhere between a cruise and a petting zoo. Judging by the number of visitors, this "happening" has a great future as an event model with a search for happiness and a lot of temporary well-being.
Games such as Mikado and Mensch-ärgere-dich-nicht were laid out on tables. You could browse through books on how to be happy. Lounging bags and mattresses invited you to linger and almost all of the performers - Angela Braun, Emily Dilewski, Kyu Choi, Lukas Tauber, Manfred Wildgruber and the via-nova choir Munich - were also part of the service team. Music was provided from time to time by the (chamber)Ensemble Lemniscate under the baton of conductor Daniel Moreira. Melodic verses and fragments rang out - sometimes instrumental, sometimes vocal, sometimes both with soloists wandering around the room. Emcee and star performer Malte Scholz played a worm in flesh-colored latex overalls and a floppy pointed hat. Frank & Frank don't specify whether they actually consider the abundant offers of fun to be a real option for happiness. The subtle jabs at their own event remain barely perceptible in the atmospheric feel-good fog.
Hearty vegetable soup, plenty of cheese and bread at a long table with beer benches are included in the admission price. The guests actually get talking to each other. The end was announced, otherwise you wouldn't have noticed it. With unusual means How's it going, how are things a manifesto against sensory overload and exaggerated expectations. In November 2024, the overlong happening will move to Theater Basel. The last day of the Biennale was once again a balance sheet with all the intermediate stages of complaisance, boredom, exaggerated self-reference and disturbance.
