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.
The change from linearity to non-linearity associated with digitalization is accompanied by a change in the perception of art and culture. We now have the chance to shape our co-existence with the algorithms, not only socially and politically, but also artistically.
Documentary film maker Felix Hentschel accompanied the production of the Mixed-Reality-Techno-Opera MAYA and held talks with the artists involved. The resulting film (ca. 40 min) illuminates the development of the Maya character and provides insights into the conception of the music and the design of the MAYA augmented reality app.
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.
Worthless. Placeless. Katharina has lost everything: the lover, the job, the apartment. In her fight against oblivion she develops extreme, hateful energies. The bustle on Münchner Freiheit serves as a stage for a fictional character who is about to exceed the normative limits of social behavior once and for all.
The audience sits in the pharmacy and looks through the shop windows onto Pasing Station Square. Viola, an apparently sad and disoriented woman, appears on the scene. She seems to be in shock, having lost touch with time and space: "Is that inside or outside now? Is it still yesterday today?"