MaerzMusik: Songs for Captured Voices

Music Theater by Laure M. Hiendl, Elaine Mitchener and KNM Berlin

Musiktheater Festival

© Rita Couto

Tickets

Ticket Prices

20 Euros, discount 15 Euro

Tickets will be sold via the MaerzMusik Festival ticketing platform. Info at: www.berlinerfestspiele.de/de/maerzmusik

 

Duration approx. 60 minutes

A memento of the unspoken: The music theatre “Songs for Captured Voices” by Laure M. Hiendl, Phila Bergmann, Thea Reifler and Göksu Kunak centres around human voices that have been instrumentalised time and again throughout history and become the object of asymmetrical power negotiations.

The background for this project are audio recordings from German prisoner-of-war camps of the First and Second World War, which are from the Lautarchiv of the Berlin Humboldt University – a unique archive of acoustic recordings worldwide. At the heart of the collection are recordings of songs as well as a variety of languages and dialects from POWs around the world. For the most part, there is little to no information about the identity of those recorded; the focus is on the collection of their dialects.

The recordings themselves are not played or reproduced onstage; rather, the capture of these human voices acts as a starting point for attentive listening: the original music composed for this project allows what remains unspoken and hidden, what exists in the in-between sounds and blurriness, to resound.

Cast

Composition and Concept
Laure M. Hiendl

Direction and Concept
Phila Bergmann
Thea Reifler

Libretto
Göksu Kunak

Voice
Elaine Mitchener

Muic
Ensemble KNM Berlin

Light
Sandra E. Blatterer

Costume
Nicholas Navarro Rueda

Photography
Rita Couto

Graphic
Jamila Wolfgruber



Ensemble KNM Berlin

Double bass clarinet
Theo Nabicht

Drums
Michael Weilacher

Violin
Theodor Flindell

Violoncello
Cosima Gerhardt

Language

English

MaerzMusik 2023

MaerzMusik sees itself as a place to exchange artistic knowledge(s) through new encounters and collective experiences. The festival is rooted in the multimodality of listening, contemporary music, and sound, employing concerts, performances, installations, music theatre, film screenings, and discursive formats to open up a space where life, art, and theory can co-exist.

→ More information: www.berlinerfestspiele.de

Credits

A production by Bergmann /Reifler /Hiendl GbR in cooperation with Radialsystem. Funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. The preliminary research was supported by the Initialförderung Fonds Darstellende Künste.

A commission by Radialsystem, funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.

An event of the Berliner Festspiele / MaerzMusik.

 

Media partners: taz. die tageszeitung, tip Berlin, ExBerliner and Rausgegangen.

A memento of the unspoken: The music theatre “Songs for Captured Voices” by Laure M. Hiendl, Phila Bergmann, Thea Reifler and Göksu Kunak centres around human voices that have been instrumentalised time and again throughout history and become the object of asymmetrical power negotiations.

The background for this project are audio recordings from German prisoner-of-war camps of the First and Second World War, which are from the Lautarchiv of the Berlin Humboldt University – a unique archive of acoustic recordings worldwide. At the heart of the collection are recordings of songs as well as a variety of languages and dialects from POWs around the world. For the most part, there is little to no information about the identity of those recorded; the focus is on the collection of their dialects.

The recordings themselves are not played or reproduced onstage; rather, the capture of these human voices acts as a starting point for attentive listening: the original music composed for this project allows what remains unspoken and hidden, what exists in the in-between sounds and blurriness, to resound.

Cast

Composition and Concept
Laure M. Hiendl

Direction and Concept
Phila Bergmann
Thea Reifler

Libretto
Göksu Kunak

Voice
Elaine Mitchener

Muic
Ensemble KNM Berlin

Light
Sandra E. Blatterer

Costume
Nicholas Navarro Rueda

Photography
Rita Couto

Graphic
Jamila Wolfgruber



Ensemble KNM Berlin

Double bass clarinet
Theo Nabicht

Drums
Michael Weilacher

Violin
Theodor Flindell

Violoncello
Cosima Gerhardt

Related

Use of Cookies
Radialsystem does not store any personal data of website visitors. Details in ourprivacy policy.