{"id":527,"date":"2010-03-22T11:26:18","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T10:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/claudiadoderer.com\/2016\/en\/portfolio\/buch-asche\/"},"modified":"2016-06-07T16:06:40","modified_gmt":"2016-06-07T14:06:40","slug":"buch-asche","status":"publish","type":"portfolio","link":"https:\/\/claudiadoderer.com\/en\/portfolio\/buch-asche\/","title":{"rendered":"BUCH ASCHE."},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]by Claudia Doderer \/ H\u00e4ndl Klaus \u00a0\/ Klaus Lang
\nTheater Bonn
\nMusical study and concept: Klaus Lang
\nConcept, production: Claudia Doderer, Klaus Lang
\nLibretto: H\u00e4ndl Klaus
\nSpace, costumes, light: Claudia Doderer
\nPremiere: June 6, 2010[\/vc_column_text][vc_tta_accordion active_section=”3″ collapsible_all=”true”][vc_tta_section title=”Ingo Dorfm\u00fcller: Sound\/Light Space” tab_id=”1458930703257-667b240e-66f2″][vc_column_text]Ingo Dorfm\u00fcller
\nSound\/Light Space
\n<\/strong>In bonnchance!,<\/em> Claudia Doderer, H\u00e4ndl Klaus, and Klaus Lang search out the future of music theater<\/p>\n

A Chinese rice farmer dreams of one day publicly humiliating the emperor, who rules over the empire with brutal force: she wants to dump ash over him. Despite her husband\u2019s protests, she acts upon her dream. The only inflammable material she can find in their impoverished household is a book. She climbs a tree that the emperor, on his way home from a massacre on the common folk, has to pass. But the attack fails: through some miracle, the ash is transformed into cherry blossoms, upon which the emperor doesn\u2019t punish the farmer, but rather rewards her with a white silk dress. The farmer will wear this dress as a sign of her grief for the fallen and murdered (in China, white is the color of mourning). This is more or less the gist of the piece, and it has many facets: Jun receives an unexpected reward for remaining true to herself and her cause, but the price she pays is that she unintentionally affirms the very state of affairs she intended to act out against. And yet: her sign of protest remains.<\/p>\n

The stage version in Bonn also articulates a protest every bit as gentle and persevering\u2014against violence and injustice, but also against their conventional, \u2018mimetic\u2019 portrayal. The composer Klaus Lang and the stage artist Claudia Doderer have broadened their concept of musical \u2018installation\u2019 (most recently in architektur des\u00a0<\/em>regens.<\/i>\u00a0at the 2008 Munich Biennial) and added a narrative dimension in the form of a libretto provided by the Austrian playwright H\u00e4ndl Klaus. In this work, music and theater are not regarded as dynamic forms of temporal art, but rather in static, spatial terms. With its many stages, its flashbacks and cuts to the future in dream visions, the plot is reduced to elementary signs presented in a temporal stretch so extreme that it comes across not as action, but rather as the metamorphosis of a state of being.<\/p>\n

The music and mise-en-sc\u00e8ne extend into the space: a long tapering catwalk leads from the stage to the parapet, where the emperor appears on a staircase in extremely slow motion wearing high buskins and a meter-long, (blood-) red train. The orchestra pit is covered over, the musicians distributed around the space, their playing coordinated not by a conductor, but rather through signals appearing on various screens, while the sounds of the chorus, played on tape, travel around the room. The music itself is a kind of train of sound that operates with endlessly delicate and subtle alterations in the area of harmonics and timbre, while strictly avoiding any \u2018hierarchical\u2019 temporal structure through melody and rhythm. While the production has a beginning and an end, it\u2019s like entering into a sound\/light space, which for its part remains static and passive.<\/p>\n

Text, music, stage, and action are all developed out of a common core of ideas; in this way, the libretto is not merely dissected into syllables and phonemes: H\u00e4ndl Klaus had to develop the text according to the music\u2019s dictates. The term Claudia Doderer uses for this work, \u201cgesamtkunstwerk,\u201d seems more than appropriate here. And yet the terror in the story the piece is based on is not aestheticized, but remains at all times decipherable. The audience isn\u2019t given a chance to identify with anyone, its capacity for empathy is not called upon, and it\u2019s not manipulated in a propagandistic way: instead, it encounters the naked facticity of a state of being and is allowed to respond to it. This is a conception entirely contrary to the history of opera and the tradition of European music theater\u2014and for precisely this reason quite possibly promising for the future (\u2026).<\/p>\n

A seamless intertwining of vocal and instrumental sounds, produced live or (in the case of the choir) \u2018projected\u2019 from a tape into the room; a coordination with the movements of the singers and dancers (choreography: Tomi Paasonen); and Claudia Doderer\u2019s exquisite light design\u2014all of it came across as wonderfully tight and impressive.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Excerpt from a review about\u00a0BUCH ASCHE.<\/em>\u00a0from Opernwelt<\/em>, 8, 2010[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_tta_section][\/vc_tta_accordion][vc_video link=”https:\/\/vimeo.com\/159924365″ el_aspect=”43″][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t

<\/p>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/rs-slide>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/rs-slide>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/rs-slide>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/rs-slides>\n\t\t\t\t<\/rs-module>\n\t\t\t\t