How I managed to get an audience for an independent experimental music-theatre piece and enjoyed applying creative entrepreneurial strategies to a publicly funded art project. I hope this report to be inspiring and motivating to fellow theatre makers. An adventure report.
As a student I had made it my habit not to turn off the music when I left the apartment but the album I was listening to had not yet come to an end. To me it seemed disrespectful towards the music to just turn it off. What was brought into oscillation should be allowed to finish. On the creation of "Small Places", a sound installation for ECM Records‘ 50th anniversary as part of the RE:ECM exhibition at Storage by Hyundai Card in Seoul, Korea, 2019.
As part of the RE:ECM exhibition at Storage by Hyundai Card in Seoul, Korea, my piece “Small Places” presents the entire music catalogue ever produced by ECM Records as a sound installation. It is inspired by the game of ping-pong which can be regarded as a metaphor for many aspects in music production: the interaction between producer and musician(s), the give and take between the musicians themselves, but also the active interplay between the listener and the music.
Created in collaboration with digital artist Lars Ullrich, "Flow" lets the visitor experience the motion inside the music. By creating an abstract landscape from the music, the visitor can explore its fluid dynamics and be part of its organic behavior: The listener is literally drawn into the music. "Flow" is part of the RE:ECM exhibition at Storage by Hyundai Card, Seoul, 2019.
As the worlds first Augmented Reality opera, MAYA staged the former heating plant Munich-Aubing as a historic site. Through the AR-app on the own smartphone, the spectator betook himself in the perspective of a new civilization in the distant future, and looked back in amazement on the demise of our current civilization in the near future.
The standard theatre situation was reconfigured to an installation- and rave-like situation by means of the MAYA augmented reality App. Alive and present as an actor was only the mezzo-soprano Martina Koppelstetter. The digital world from which she originated was only visible through smartphones and AR. Experiencing this world through own smartphones, the audience strolled through the ruins and became the counterpart for MAYA with its presence, augmenting MAYA’s loneliness: MAYA had to sing against a mass of audience members gaping through their smartphones.
VERGEHEN is an opera that you walk. Simply download the VERGEHEN app to your smartphone, take your headphones and walk at the Munich river Isar. You can walk VERGEHEN on any day at any time and in any weather.