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2009 October 23rd

 

UT-OP.er
Or the eternal now

freely adapted from "Utopia" by Thomas Morus from 1516

Music theatre by Alexander Strauch (music) and Martina Veh (text)

A project of the Saxon State Opera Dresden (artistic director Prof. Gerd Uecker) in the High Voltage Hall of the Technical University Dresden, on 23 October 2009, 8 p.m.

Premiere (first performance) on 23 October 2009
Further performances: 24, 25, 28 October and last performance on 1 November 2009 at 8.00 p.m. in each case

Music, concept: Alexander Strauch
Idea, concept and staging: Martina Veh
Space and costume, concept: Kristina Siegel

Musical direction: Gelsomino Rocco
Space and costume: Kristina Siegel
Dramaturgy: Stefan Ulrich
Lighting: Steffen Adermann
Video: Knut Geng

Photos: Matthias Kreuziger


With Christopher Robson (counter-tenor)
And: Ralf Arndt (dance), Lin Lin Fan (coloratura soprano), Clemens Heidrich (bass), Gerald Hupach (tenor), Sofi Lorentzen (alto), Romy Petrick (coloratura soprano), Steffen Rössler (bass), Carola Schwab (dance),
Speaker: Johannes Beckmann


About the piece:
A journey rich in images of time, place, coincidence, of the confrontation between reality and desire, of joy and intoxication, of catastrophe, of the crowd to the individual, of the  individual to his inner world, a journey in search of utopia.
Ou-topos, the non-place. Utopia, a recently discovered island somewhere in the New World. Thomas More's little book was published in December 1516 - despite its humorous distance, a radical attempt to reflect on the ideal of human equality and power structures in a time of change. The protagonist, an explorer named Hythloday, which means "the paddler in nonsense", has gone missing. We go in search of him.


"Utopia" by Thomas More is a kind of kalaidoscope through which we look fragmentarily into our present time, thereby placing ourselves in relation to it and depicting it fragmentarily. Thomas More found himself in a time of transition, the dawn of modern times. Upheaval and change are the themes of our project. The loss of the "great utopias" has resulted in a multiform mass of individuals who open up new impulses and forces for change. The change in which the human being of today is thrown, the search in "nowhere" for a place to stay, finding oneself again in the cafés of the metropolises, a glass of lemonade, a memory of paradise.

If for Morus Utopia is still a place that is only theoretically conceivable as an unrealisable fantasy, then - looking at today's social, political and societal circumstances - one can ponder whether this utopia of 500 years ago has not become reality, at least in part. A utopia of the past would thus be lived today.
Ou tópos, the non-place; it expresses what we people of today can feel: A kind of placelessness that characterises our society. Without belonging, there is no utopia, only individual longings and desires: one's own happiness, financial security and emotional satisfaction, etc. A social utopia can only develop if a certain sense of belonging is defined. But its definition has shifted: today it includes concepts such as the place of work, the place of living, the language space, the ideal, the character and the emotional place. Looking at today, it is not easy to find an existing utopia valid for the community of people in the globalised world. But at least there is one: human rights! A utopia?

 

And after Utopia? Maybe something completely different will come? Perhaps no more Utopia that is shaped by a humanistic world view? Maybe another Utopia will be written that will be realised in another 500 or 50 years?
The crisis? Certainly not a financial crisis, but rather a spiritual one.

 

Content:
The protagonist receives a commission from Thomas Morus. He is to find the person whose factual account of a distant place known to him, 'Utopia', Morus wrote down in his book of the same name in order to check its truthfulness before publishing the work. The commissioner sets out on a search. In the process, he gets caught in a time machine, in an un-place of the present, a transit space. With the help of the book enclosed with the assignment, he tries to make sure that he is on the right track. Strange things happen to the seeker and he encounters present-day people. Suspecting that he has landed directly in Utopia, not just a pleasant world, he despairs and collapses.
In the second part of the play, we look into the protagonist's inner world. His innermost images and fantasies, realities and fears are mixed together. An inner view of a contemporary world. People move differently. Time is no longer sortable.
In the end, the commissioner finds out that he himself is the one he is looking for, Raphael Hythloday, the "paddler in nonsense" and that he himself has arrived in Utopia, an eternal now and that it is up to him to rewrite, rewrite or destroy the book. Maybe something new will come. He passes the order off and on to the audience.

 

Comment:
On paddling in the non-place
With "Utopia", the description of an "ideal" society, Thomas More set the (ge)important marker for the genre of social utopia; the work is considered the first state novel of modern times, which on the one hand criticises English society at the beginning of the 16th century in its depravity, criminality and political disorder. On the other hand, "Utopia" depicts the intact social order of an island called Utopia, which offers its inhabitants a life of prosperity, justice and peace - a utopia of life. But Utopia means non-place, nowhere-land. Its main town, Amaurotum (Fog City), lies on the "river without water", and the name of the traveller who describes this world, Hythloday, can be translated as "chatterer" or also as "paddler in nonsense"; apart from these linguistic finesses of humorous handling of designations and names, it is obvious that Morus here takes the path far away from a reality of life towards a super-reality. He draws a place that exists only as a thought and thus proves to be seemingly unrealisable. 

 

From the deletion of half a millennium
This book became the trigger for the project "UT-OP.er", in which topics are discussed that, as if sucked out of Morus' "Utopia", document their timeless topicality. As if the time jump of almost 500 years did not exist, Martina Veh recognises parallels between Morus' writing and today. A chance constellation in a street café gave playwright Veh the impetus: "The explosiveness of Thomas More's tone completely captivated me, all the more so because there was a daily newspaper on my breakfast table at the same time. Utopia': the resounding fear of censorship, the nevertheless radical attempt to think critically about the power and economic structures of his time, to put the expansionist policy of the then emerging Europe in a very critical light, above all also on the basis of simple everyday examples... All this in connection with the current daily newspaper, whose author could just as well have been the author of 'Utopia', kept me on tenterhooks. Parallels upon parallels jumped out at me and inspired me to start a project..."

 

Living in Utop?
How are people who live in the now, in this utopia? These are our characters... These are us! These are the psychological traps, the satiety and its shadows, ...the "not being able/wanting to do anything", no longer being able to go to the polls because one has the choice of living "everywhere and nowhere"... A problem of our society is also the placelessness and thus a responsibility that is difficult to assign. Through placelessness, I think, a utopia that refers to a community diffuses into the wishes and desires of single individuals. A social utopia can probably only be developed if there is a certain sense of belonging to a group or social structure that until a few decades ago was always locally bound.

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