How does music theatre emerge when you don’t treat it as a finished work, but as a shared process? Kassandra in Bielefeld is, for me, a rare example that this can actually succeed.
Sound compositions for Cabaret (dir. Claus Guth) at the Residenztheater Munich. The work focuses on the spaces between the songs: transitions, pauses, and guided silence – a sound layer between music and noise that connects the musical numbers.
In 1733, Voltaire and Rameau collaborated to create the opera "Samson", which was censored and whose music was lost. Claus Guth and Raphaël Pichon revive the spirit of this project, commissioned by the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Samson, isolated by his power, becomes a destructive force through disappointing love affairs. I have contributed sound compositions.
A woman and a man. Did he kidnap her? Is he holding her against her will? Or is it a game? And if so, which of the two will win? British playwright Martin Crimp has written twelve variations on an encounter in which the boundary between power and powerlessness is constantly shifting. I created Music and sound design for the production by Thomas Jonigk at Schauspiel Köln.
"In 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the planner and organizer of the Holocaust, was sentenced to death by hanging in Jerusalem. In one of the most highly regarded trials of the post-war period, unbearable details about the National Socialist extermination machinery and its perpetrators come to light for the world public, because the defendant talks. Music and Sounddesign for the staging by Thomas Jonigk at the Schauspiel Köln.
The first performance of Pension Schöller took place in Berlin in 1890, was filmed several times and has since regularly caused tears in the theater, of course with laughter. Thomas Jonigk undertakes a fundamental reworking of the play and transports the supposedly harmless comedy into our Federal Republic reality, where the boundaries between delusion, grotesqueness, nightmare and political everyday life can often no longer be drawn. Staatstheater Kassel, premiere July 2, 2021
Klaus Mann outlined in his novel the timeless dancing on the volcano and the fall of the glamorous. A panorama of his contemporaries, the artists and intellectuals, children of the gods of the Golden Twenties, who did not want to give up their ecstasy even when swastikas were already flying over Babylon. But above all, the text is a portrait of a famous actor: Gustaf Gründgens. Staging by Thomas Jonigk at the Staatstheater Kassel.
Starting from an omnipresent end-time mood, Emre Akal and his team ask for this: "What is it that you are looking for? What comes after the imaginable future, after the collapse of liberal democracy and old Europe as we knew it? In a formally abstract world of images, they let the future rub against the past - always remembering: What are we leaving behind as society today, the people of the future, and will we have learned from our mistakes? What remains of... us?
"Sometimes I ask myself how they can do that: to hate so much. How they can be so sure. Because that's what the haters must be: safe. Otherwise they wouldn't speak like that, hurt like that, murder like that. They must be sure. Without any doubt. Doubtful of hate cannot be hated." On the basis of concrete incidents, Emcke examines institutional racism, group-related misanthropy and disregard and finally pleads for a heterogeneous society and humanism.
Didier Eribon's book of the same name was published in German in 2016 and quickly became a bestseller. The resulting debate about the socially "dependent", who are overflowing to the right-wing camp, continues to be lively. In the theatre version by director Thomas Jonigk we bring Eribon's hybrid narrative between sociological study, emotional-biographical narrative of a boy growing up in a homophobic environment and pure poetry to the stage of Schauspiels Köln.