MEDIATHEK

What happens when the subsidized cultural institutions were to disappear from the societal map one by one? If we broke with the particularly German tradition of statefunded art, music, literature and theatre invention and the regional and municipal governments left the field (and their houses) exclusively to commercially interested parties? Purely a vision of a distant future? Hardly: not a day goes by without reports about the imminent closure of a cultural institution. Questions about the future of institutional cultural establishments are not new. And yet little thought is put into models of prospective, mobile cultural offers beyond festivals and guest performances.

With their project T-HOUSE-TOUR the Berlin opera company NOVOFLOT attempts a pilot exercise of possible forms and structures of musical theatre in motion. The THOUSE-TOUR is not a production in the strict sense of the word. It is an improvisational work in progress about forms of musical theatre that do not depend on the organisational and spatial circumstances of a single institution, but adapt to where they appear.

With the project’s title, NOVOFLOT creates a link to the ancient teahouse culture of Asia including its definitions of hosting, ritual, contemplation and free discussion. The review of the two meanings of the T-HOUSE title reveals the artistic experiment of the tour: while NOVOFLOT on one hand examines the possibilities of mobile (and adaptive) performance structures, in the course of the T-HOUSE-TOUR it also transforms traditional (repertoire) forms of opera and musical theatre. Thus comes into being a largely improvised form of opera that is open to immediate reactions between the participants and for intervention by the visitors and audience members.