The Munich Biennale, organized by the Cultural Department of the City of Munich, is one of the world's leading world premiere festivals for contemporary music theater. The composer Hans Werner Henze, who founded the Biennale in 1988, saw the festival primarily as a platform for young composers. His aim was to open up a new repertoire for music theater and thus secure its future.
Humanity is on the move more than ever before and the world around us is changing inexorably. With the motto "On the way", the Munich Biennale 2024 is making movement itself its theme. Eleven productions will illuminate paths from different perspectives. Paths that people take, paths that the world takes: into the heat, into the global, into the digital, on foot or in the head.
Searching for Zenobia by Lucia Ronchetti
Germany 2024: Zeina is dying. Her daughter Leyla comes across her mother's diary, which Zeina wrote to give Leyla an understanding of her own history. With Leyla, we immerse ourselves in the biography of the Syrian archaeologist who once researched Palmyra and the history of the ancient Queen Zenobia before she was forced by the war to leave Syria and seek refuge in Germany. Here, her thoughts keep wandering back to her homeland. Above all, she is accompanied by the imagined presence of Zenobia, with whom she enters into an intimate dialog.
Lucia Ronchetti and Mohammad Al Attar tell the stories of two Syrian female characters: Zeina combines real and complex experiences of flight and migration of various modern women. She relates her own biography to the life of Zenobia. Her musical sphere is characterized by fragments from Albinoni's Venetian opera of the same name and elements of traditional Syrian music. These influences are shaped by the singing of Mais Harb and the percussionist Elias Aboud, who - like Al Attar - come from Syria and are now among the outstanding artists of their culture in Germany.
May 31, June 1 and 2, 2024
Lucia Ronchetti © Andrea Avezzù
Shall I build a dam? by Kai Kobayashi
The composer Kai Kobayashi, who has been working intensively with music theater for years, and the choreographer and performer Simone Aughterlony are working together for the first time. Their scenic project describes a path of inner development and transformation that becomes visible and audible as a spatial process. How do we change "on the way"?
June 1, 2, 3 and 4, 2024
RÜBER by Nico Sauer
RÜBER is a passenger transportation music theater by Nico Sauer. The passenger compartment of a limousine becomes a mobile theater hall, the traffic becomes part of the synesthetic experience between the interior and the outside world and the route becomes the choreography of a random movement. Musicians and actors drive, perform and direct the multi-sensory journey through Munich's city center.
June 1 to 4 and 6 to 10, 2024
Territorios Duales / Double Bottom by Carlos Gutiérrez
Together with the artist Tatiana Lopez and a group of 100 non-professional musicians from Munich, the composer Carlos Gutiérrez is developing a sound theater based on elements of traditional Bolivian highland music. The cooperation project with the Munich Adult Education Center questions South American and Western European ways of perceiving sounds and sound production and, after an unusual start in Hall X, expands into an increasingly ramified sound sculpture in the Isar floodplains.
June 2 and 9, 2024
nimmersatt by Eve Georges / Jiro Yoshioka
A project of the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich
Eat or be eaten? The immersive music theater premiere "nimmersatt" invites the audience to embark on a political adventure through the man-made food cycle using virtual reality and live performance.
June 3 to 6, 2024
Collective Joy (under construction) by Andreas Eduardo Frank / Patrick Frank
Composers Andreas Eduardo Frank, Patrick Frank and director Georg Schütky go in search of so-called happiness in the economic centers of Munich and Basel. What is the relationship between the happiness of the collective and the unhappiness of individuals? Is it possible to share the path to happiness with others? Together with the ensemble Lemniscate, singers, performers, an amateur choir and amateur actors from Munich, they put various concepts of happiness up for debate in a musical performance and examine the resulting concepts of life and society.
June 4 to 7, 2024
The new lines
Three music theater premieres for the public space of the city of Munich
How can contemporary music theater contribute to the invention and formulation of new (thought) lines for a meaningful mobility of the future? By producing unusual theatrical settings in public space that nobody can ignore! By opening stations of the future in the middle of the city (and thus in front of everyone's eyes!), by creating robot-controlled and music-fed means of transportation or by setting in motion new flows of knowledge, remembrance and forgetting in the midst of visitors to the HP8 municipal library! With "The New Lines", the Biennale seeks to emphasize the importance of artistic thinking for tackling key socio-political issues. For this special pilot project, the Munich Biennale is inviting three independent production groups from Finland (Oblivia), the Netherlands (Het Geluid) and Germany (Novoflot), which have been shaping the European music theater scene for many years and are now producing for the Biennale for the first time together with the composers Ted Hearne, Tamara Miller, Du Yun and Yiran Zhao. The three world premieres will be shown several times a day from June 5 - 9 or can be attended during certain opening hours.
The Gates are (nearly) open by Novoflot
It is Europe's first MBE station to be set up in the middle of Munich's city center for the Biennale. MBE is the abbreviation for "Maximum Broad Effect" and stands for multi-adaptable docking and handling procedures that can be used to serve a wide variety of means of transportation in future urban public transport. A unique innovation that raises great expectations. However, the inauguration of the new station precedes its commissioning and it is the Berlin opera company Novoflot that is staging the opening celebrations for the new Munich station, which will last several days. Under the motto "The Gates are (nearly) open", Novoflot and the composer Du Yun invite all city dwellers and international guests to take a first look at the station, which is operated with MBE technology, demonstrate the music-controlled energy supply, open the "Feel well and easily moved" areas of the station for the first time and present some of the protagonists from the management of the new Munich attraction.
June 5, 6, 7 and 9, 2024
Turn Turtle Turn from Het Geluid
"How did it come to this?" In the geological age of the Anthropocene and its man-made crises, Oblivia poses this question as the starting point for their new piece, which will be premiered as part of the Munich Biennale 2024 in the outdoor and indoor spaces of the City Library in HP8. Once again, the Finnish export hits of the new music theater scene approach the great themes of humanity in their work, which they approach with subtle wit in text fragments, movement and new music. Together with three local singers and the twelve-piece ensemble ö! under the direction of Francesc Prat, the four performers from Oblivia create a grandiose tableau in "Turn Turtle Turn": they meander playfully and pointedly between the dinosaur age and adventure stories, between the Ice Age and parallel worlds, prehistoric geography and our hunt for fossil fuels. Sometimes close, sometimes seemingly completely adrift, "Turn Turtle Turn" moves on a search for clues to the status quo of humanity between ongoing (self-)destruction and persistent hope.
June 5, 6, 7 and 9, 2024
Ensemble Ö © Ensemble Ö
In Pass age by Tamara Miller, Ted Hearne
"In Passage" is a music theater project that explores our connections with a technological and digital world, while we ourselves remain analog and physical humans. Through the interplay between a (specially developed) kinetic sound sculpture, a choir, an ensemble of musicians and new compositions, we discover new connections between the virtual and the 'real' in our modern urban environment. "In Passage" is music theater about new forms of collective work, about technical and social development processes that could set future societies in motion.
June 5, 7, 8 and 9, 2024
Mithatcan Öcal © Mithatcan Öcal
Defect by Mithatcan Öcal
The earth is lost. In the wasteland of a terrifyingly real future after the great catastrophe, it's high time to make a run for it. So if you have a spaceship, you can count yourself lucky - but before Mike Tango, Sierra Sierra, Charlie Golf and Mandy Lemon can make their escape, the ship and on-board computer have to play along again. But on closer inspection, they turn out to be surprisingly headstrong and lively...
Defekt (UA) is a commissioned work in cooperation with the Staatstheater Kassel. The Istanbul composer Mithatcan Öcal is regarded as one of the greatest international talents in contemporary music. He stands for strong musical concepts along great traditional lines and musical logics of his own in a radical large-scale form that is consciously anti-eclectic. The text for the space opera was written by the interdisciplinary artist cylixe, who will also be responsible for the videos for the production. Her works move across the visual arts and through a wide variety of media, along social and political fault lines, through human networks and realities, across continents - and for this commissioned work even through space and time.
June 8, 9 and 10, 2024
