MEDIATHEK

For “PAUL PRACTICES“, the performance group FUX encounters the theatrical genre of the opera to create an alternative aesthetic for music theatre. As a counterpart to the opulent opera-apparatus they appear as a 3-headed ensemble. The pompous opera house is replaced by a blank, empty room. The budget gets reduced so that no orchestra tone could be played live. This huge disproportion obligates FUX to find new solutions. They expose themselves to a radical excessive demand that forces them to be composers, librettists, directors, conductors, musicians, singer, performer and technicians at once. They appropriate the opera to make something different out of it. To do so, they target the opera “Lanzelot” by Paul Dessau, Heiner Müller & Ginka Tscholakowa, written in 1969 for the 20th birthday of the German Democratic Republic and premiered at the Staatsoper Berlin. “Lanzelot” is a monumental opera for 270 participants with a multitude of composition-styles and a multilayer variation of the dragonslayer epic. Back then, Dessau and Müller formulated the clear aim to create a better world with the opera. What might seem anachronistic today is exactly what interests FUX. How are the contemporary chances for such an emphatic political understanding of art in general and opera in particular?

From the music and text structures of “Lanzelot”, FUX abstracts new patterns, which they enlarge to the theatrical space, the light dramaturgy, the narrative, the stage acts and the music until there’s no single note or word from the original left. Everything got converted and reformulated. What happens on stage has to be generated and operated only by the three FUX-members. So, they have to practice: with their instruments, the technology, their voices and bodies, their presence on stage, the alternative big picture. The evolving interplay of music, technology and scenic action is getting too complex to master without failure. If a mistake occurs, they have to stop and rewind to wipe it out in the repetition. In “PAUL PRACTICES”, to practice doesn’t only mean the rehearsal of the performance, but to practice within the performance itself.

By that, FUX explores if and how the utopian and the practicing of a different society can take place in music theatre today. Can our contemporary society practice something in common or is it doomed to only individual exercises in self-optimization? This question becomes a leitmotif in finding a new opera for the independent theatre.