Commissions to Mithatan Öcal and Lucia Ronchetti

The Münchener Biennale for New Music Theater is entitled On the way this year. The 2024 edition of the festival takes up and continues the origins of the Münchener Biennale. As a world premiere festival, the Biennale is naturally on the way, seeking and accompanying change. People and societies are also on the move. They develop, they cover stages, not always voluntarily, often with pain or great resistance. We are experiencing all of this right now. We, the late moderns, are living in an era of transition, a threshold period. The all-dominant digitalization means permanent disruption of conditions and extremely accelerated transformation. Climate change and globalization are driving millions of people out of their home regions, and migrant flows are greater than ever before. Many of these journeys are not voluntary, but they promise the greatest changes for both those leaving and those arriving.

Under the title On the way, the artists invited by the Münchener Biennale explore contemporary forms of movement and change. By tracing the transformations and changes in society, in the family and in the bodies and brains of individuals, movement becomes recognizable as a complex context, as a network of social and geographical shifts consisting of highways, one-way streets, dead ends and construction sites. Accordingly, the main focus will be on escape routes, shortcuts, dream destinations, pursuit and change. And about thinking about new urban infrastructure systems. What does it mean to want to move sensibly in the urban space of the future? What vehicles, network plans, timing and resting points will be needed? The Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation is enabling two commissions for music theater to Mithatan Öcal and Lucia Ronchetti.

In addition to collaborations with four state theaters, the Münchener Biennale invites three independent groups and music theater collectives to submit their proposals for an artistic infrastructure change as part of a special project and to present them in pilot projects at various locations in Munich. The “New Lines” of the Biennale are about the invention of a new Munich route, new junctions, stops and a timetable design incorporating the latest research results from the fields of psychoacoustics, mobile architecture and vocal and instrumental sound transformation.

On the way advocates the participation of music theater in the emerging movement patterns of the present and near future. Without prospects? Anyone who claims this is no longer actively turning the wheel of history, but is instead a well-oiled cog in the wheel, promoting the imminent disappearance of themselves.

Further information:
muenchenerbiennale.de

Dates

Lucia Ronchetti: Searching for Zenobia
May 31, June 1 and 2, 2024
Muffathalle, Munich

Mithatcan Öcal: Defekt
June 8, 9 and 10, 2024
Muffathalle, Munich