Imagine fluorescent lighting. Imagine a PowerPoint presentation. Imagine a young professional mom. Imagine a semi-intellectual seminar on recovering after a postnatal depression. Imagine an analog synthesizer on wheels. Imagine a musical song about your baby falling off the couch. Imagine the world collapsing. Imagine far too many words. Imagine far too much emotion. Imagine far too little hope. Imagine hope.
What starts as a hallucinatory seminar on how to overcome an existential crisis, ends in a cathartic submersion in noise.
In this intensely immersive performance opera, born out of the urgency to learn how to navigate a world in collapse, Club Gewalt asks themselves the question: how can you readjust your senses under the constant static of information predicting the apocalypse? How do we give meaning to a future that doesn’t overflow with prosperity?
We live in a time of polycrisis. We are confronted with the renaissance of fascism, the arrival of the climate crisis, Western complicity in a genocide, vegetables and fruit full of PFAS, our own identities that turn out to be contaminated with (internalized) racism, sexism and homophobia. Once, we were promised a future of stability and progress; now systems all around us and in ourselves are threatening to collapse. The human survival instinct (LION! DANGER! FIGHT OR FLIGHT! SURVIVE! CELEBRATE!) is failing massively when it comes to dealing with the complexity of today’s problems. Our amygdala’s* are being immensely overstimulated and we are getting stuck in an anxiety limbo. Can we learn to accept the collapsing of systems as a law of nature, without ceasing our protest against injustice? Can we heal ourselves by, instead of only naming the crises, feeling them deeply? Can we finally complete our stress cycles, so we can navigate a world on fire? Can we fall in love with being human all over again? And: is this the moment to find God? Cuz: never waste a good crisis.
*The amygdala(pl.: amygdalae or amygdalas; Greek, ἀμυγδάλη = amygdalē) is a paired nuclearcomplex present in the cerebral hemispheresof vertebrates. It has a primary role in the processing of memory, decision-making, and emotional responses (including fear, anxiety, and aggression). (source: wikipedia)
NOISE is an international music theatre production by Club Gewalt, which is made in collaboration with Neuköllner Oper Berlin. The international premiere takes place on April 16th. The Dutch premiere takes place at the end of May, during O. Festival for Opera. Music. Theatre., in Rotterdam. In the fall, the production will be shown at theatre festivals and will tour in the Netherlands.
Club Gewalt is a music-based performance collective from Rotterdam. Rooted in rage fueled by injustice and love for togetherness, they make, compose, produce and perform their own work: ranging from feminist punk-christmas musicals and introspective killjoy operas about institutional racism, to disruptive club nights in museums and political slutpop concerts. Always highly skilled, musical, playful and somehow awkward. Club Gewalt is addicted to crowds and, on the eve of the apocalypse, they sing their lungs out in an attempt to unlock an alternative timeline.
