MEDIATHEK

MONU is a multimedia requiem of war for large choir, string orchestra, organ, trombone, percussion, soprano and tenor, composed by Benjamien Lycke to a libretto by Mien Bogaert. The creation on April the 22th in the Concert Hall of Bruges (Belgium) was organised by the young artist collective synART, grounded in 2013 to stage contemporary music theatre through a synergy of different art forms. Their first production, MONU, crosses over boundaries between opera, oratorio, requiem, dance theatre and video art.

The libretto of MONU forms a confrontation between text fragments of the classical requiem and quotes from poets, philosophers and journalists. Together, the quotes build a storyline about an individual who is thrown in the world at the end of the 19th century and soon gets acquainted with both nationalism and industrialisation. The individual experiences how christian morality is replaced by the Homeric code of honour loyalty and revenge. War is calling and words are translated in deeds. However, standing on the battlefield, the products of the industrialisation, the nationalistic pride and the Homeric code ingloriously drown in the mud. The individual is torn out of life as brutal as he was thrown into the world, and a heartbreaking lament of a lover who is left behind cannot change this.

The highly dramatic composition of Benjamien Lycke tries to bridge the gap between post-1945 avant-garde music and more popular music (like movie soundtracks influenced by Wagner and Glass), aiming to reach a broad audience. MONU’s staging includes a choreography for six dancers and two opera soloists, a set design and several video projections. The dancers and opera soloists (stage directions by Mien Bogaert and choreography by Talitha De Decker) visualise the story of the individual, playing with steel reinforcement cages (products of the industrialisation), earth (the mud of a trench warfare), and jute (required to restrain the mud). The performers are playing in front of a huge LED wall on which the process of deforestation is shown, with the tree as a metaphor for the individual soldier (the video projections were done by architect Jason Slabbynck).

Due to our limited resources, we could rent the Concert Hall of Bruges for only one day. On this one day, we managed to build up the set design and the LED wall, to design the entire lightning plan, to do a technical rehearsal, to create MONU for a full house and to clean up everything before midnight.