Songs of Rebellion

After "iScreen, YouScream" (2017), “Songs of Rebellion”, is the second production of Brigitta Muntendorf and Michael Höppner. In this working process, the two ensembles for contemporary music theater and contemporary music Opera Lab Berlin and Ensemble Garage, whose artistic direction Brigitta Muntendorf and Michael Höppner respectively hold, will meet for the first time. Both ensembles are in different ways dedicated to theatrical performativity, question performance situations and their musicians appear as performers. With the clarinetist and performer Carola Schaal, Maximilian Estudies (sound direction), Jule Saworski (stage/costumes) and Andreas Huck & Roland Nebe aka WARPED TYPE (live-video and visuals), five artists join the project, who have all been working with Muntendorf and/or Höppner. In “Songs of Rebellion”, they follow the attempt to create a process following the idea of a “Community of Practice”, in which collective interpretations and reflections are essential for the unpredictable artistic result.

“Songs of Rebellion”, chooses a new approach in dealing with different historical approaches of a music theater of the song. The basis is not a special story, not a drama in the true sense. No fictional act is played and sung, but a performative event is composed and staged, whose integral and formative components are songs. In the process, the emerging music theater performance - in line with our interest in the socio-political phenomenon of the rebellion - oscillates between a confrontation with the political manifestation, its contradictions and other cultural performances of the song. In “Songs of Rebellion”, all musicians are at the same time performers and singers. As actors, they connect forms of protests from different epochs to the new definitions that emerge from the digital revolution and in their appearance a variety of new possibilities in the composition and staging of songs await their release.