An empty stage. One body. Two parallel universes. In I MUST DIE, performer Nico Sauer meets… himself. And one of them is not going to survive. A musical theatre solo between everyday sounds, Jacques Tati-style absurdity, and seriously nerve-wracking suspense.
Light and music split the stage into two worlds. They exist side by side, completely unaware of each other. Until they aren’t. Because in the multiverse, the tiniest shift can trigger a catastrophe: an alter ego crosses into the other’s world – and commits murder. Suddenly, we’re in a crime thriller between realities. The audience becomes the detective, forced to question everything: Which world is real? Who can we trust? While murder is happening somewhere in the soundscape, the protagonist calmly waters his invisible flowers. Absurd. Macabre. Musical.
A solo multiverse thriller – and a survival guide for the ultimate encounter with yourself. How do you recognize your double? And how do you beat them to the punch? Because there’s one golden rule in the multiverse: IF YOU MEET YOUR DOUBLE, KILL IT!
Team
WITH Nico Sauer
DIRECTION, TEXT & COMOSITION Nico Sauer ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Jonas Vescoli DRAMATURGY Pauline Jacob
SOUND Klim Losovsky LIGHT Ralf Arndt EVENING MANAGEMENT Sophie Reavley, Regina Triebel EVENING SERVICE MANAGEMENT Vanda Hehr
About Nico Sauer
Nico Sauer composes, directs, and performs experimental music theater in a delirium of disciplinary boundary-crossing, reveling in the frictions and absurdities between genres, forms, and expectations. His recent works include Atlantide Acide (2023), a solo opera that uses a microphone probe to explore the sonic depths of the human body; RÜBER (2024, Münchener Biennale), a traffic opera set in the streets of the city, with the audience seated in a moving car; and the music theater piece Die Kantine (2026, Theater Münster / Staatstheater Darmstadt), which transforms the opera space into a hybrid, behind-the-scenes environment where the highly artificial and the everyday drama of opera and its operations merge.
Nico Sauer also explores the translation of text into sound using artificial intelligence. Inspired by C. G. Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, the latent space is understood as a symbolic relational system from which soundscapes emerge, transcending physical and conceptual boundaries to create “dreamlike” audio environments. The project is supported by the STIP-4 program of Musikfonds e.V.
PREMIERE 23 October 2026 LANGUAGE English & German DURATION 60 minutes
NOTE
A shot is being fired in the production. Strobe lights and haze effects are being used.
