MEDIATHEK

“Hi Victim” (Endlich Opfer!) was performed by the ÖENM at the pocket opera festival in Salzburg and deals with a photo, which was given to the composers in the beginning of the composition process. This photo shows Italian sunbathers at the beach of Naples ignoring two dead gipsy girls lying covered with towels on the beach – it shocked the world in 2006.

When I received the photo I told the stage director Thierry Bruehl that I won’t make a music theatre about this scene. What kind of music doesn’t raise the moral pointing finger and what kind of music doesn’t celebrate pain? But the more I thought about these questions I asked myself about the moment, in which you’re confronted with a scene like this. What exactly is this awkward silence, this faint feeling of powerlessness? And I recognized that this void is full of blatant and unfulfilled desires, a methodically insanity compressed in a strong corset strangulating humanity and compassion.


“Hi Victim” starts at this point – an empty stage, a counting voice, musicians appear by following strict vector courses along the stage. Some are blowing dust through instruments and disappear, some are playing on their positions, isolated in the stage space. A colored conductor (Vimbayi Kaziboni) is projected conducting at the wall in the back of the protagonists – he’s ignored by the performers, trying to sync with the live, the white conductor, but left alone at the wall. The music consists of a live part by the ensemble and of a synchronized tape. As the stage the music is composed in thinking of spiral developing – every minute a new performer enters the stage (entering and leaving the stage is part of the score) till a machine is created without pausing. After 12 minutes the stage is full of musicians, a children choir, singers and an actor – they’re representing the corset of insanity, the method that doesn’t allow anybody to slip out of the system. “Hi Victim” has no libretto – the singers sing through solmization, the voice of the tape is counting and the actor is the only performer, that crosses the existing ways and interacts with musicians and the projected conductor – scene, music and video are interlacing each other and tell a story without any words. With the quote of “Oh Superman, Oh judge” in the end of “Hi victim” it’s obvious that this pocket opera is not a story about redemption, it’s the story of watching the void - with the aim to create a reflecting moment for the prerequisite of humanity.