Spielzeit 26.08. - 09.10.

Heaven can’t be as beautiful as this!

Schlingensief’s dream: an opera village in Africa a benefit evening with Christoph Schlingensief performance

“Doctors in ancient Greece prescribed listening to choirs for the sick.  Opera is as much music as it is healing – as it is life, and as it is the polis.  There were criminals in the opera – and kings.  Just such a mixture of so many things is how I imagine our project.  You don’t go to experience an event, but maybe you go along and you end up in a hospital where a child is just being born.  Then you walk further and there are bees on a baobab – on a monkey bread tree - and discover: that’s exactly the sound that opera needs to be alive.  I believe this place is a mirror and a surface where we can learn from Africa what we can no longer do but will need in the future.” / Christoph Schlingensief

Christoph Schlingensief’s book So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein - “Heaven can’t be as beautiful as this” - portrays the fear of finding oneself sick in a world which knows no other thought but suffering and is not even capable of understanding this.  Schlingensief has used all his might to force himself to record his thoughts, going beyond the limits of his own language which is incapable of expressing what he demands of it.  He talks about himself in a way which explodes the boundaries which confine death and dying within private silence.  He has extracted a power from his own suffering which allows him to see his own images once again and think his own thoughts once again.

The notion of building an opera village in Africa has long since turned into an active process.  After numerous research trips to Africa, Christoph Schlingensief laid the foundation stone for this major project in Burkina Faso at the beginning of February 2010 and is continuing his search for sponsors and helpers.

On a benefit tour right across Germany Schlingensief will not only read from his book but will also describe the ever-changing status of his Africa project, searching for people who wish to become part of his image of “opera village Africa”.

All money received goes towards making the opera village happen, the attempt to return opera to its original cycle and ‘to live’ within the great wealth of Africa.  Opera as a living organism, which receives, transports and gives.  Each to his own opera!