The mountains, an oil rig, the desert….three places in our plays that stand for a desire to explore the world and for a world of change, and thus for the themes and artist* teams in the 22/23 season.
With the STEGREIF.orchestra and an international team, the NEW SONGS FROM THE EARTH sing of climate change and the global goals and challenges we see as opportunities for positive change and the transformation we all need. With this spirit, we once again fan out into our city following the successful performance series THE PRESENT SAVES THE WORLD.
In RADIOLAND we explore another transformation: the assertion of a new music and world view through beat and pop music at the end of the 60s and at the same time the concrete utopia of founding our own free states – inspired by the story of SEALAND, an oil rig off the coast of England, which is as true as it is incredible. Which brings us to the turbulence of social transformation, which as always is also about power – as a group of musical performers must experience in the hit musical PARADISE LOST. Or those in the new musical SCHNEEWITTCHEN, who want to retell the good old fairy tale – but how, in times of political correctness and cancel culture?
In a desert we encounter the CLUB DER TOTEN KOMPONISTINNEN (AT): unredeemed, unfairly treated in their lifetime and still not sufficiently seen and heard as the dead – a third leitmotif of our program focuses on the transformation towards gender justice, which is as necessary as it is rich in perspective. With CLUB, we continue our series on women in music and society, following CASTING CLARA, LILI. THE LAST NIGHT OF LILI BOULANGER, and a world premiere on OLGA, an interrogation of the life and myth of Olga Benario, murdered by the Nazis.
Another famous unknown is Consuelo Velazquez: she wrote a hit song on an aria by the Spanish composer Enrique Granados that went around the world: BÉSAME MUCHO. We follow Velazquez and Granados in a German-Spanish chamber play. And perhaps the lack of knowledge and unfair recognition of women could also be described with the title DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN – the great opera by Richard Strauss is dedicated to Ulrike Schwab (WOLFSKINDER, GIOVANNI and others), who returns to the Neuköllner Oper in August 2023 after working in Germany and Sweden.
How is our life as tenants transforming in the Berlin housing market?
SCHÖNER WOHNEN provides answers to this question that are as astounding as they are entertaining. And the experiments in the WUNDERKAMMER series, which continue to be held at special locations in our city, invite you to find out how expertise and music can be transformed into wonder and perhaps also into a different way of looking at the world.
Keyword experiment: if you are interested in your own transformations and active participation, the NEW SONGS FROM THE EARTH will encourage concrete action in accompanying programs, as will a new network meeting on the topic of women and music theater.