MYSTERY – Don´t visualize it!
Interactive Video Opera for two Singer and String Quartett
In her new interactive video opera, the Munich composer Helga Pogatschar explores the theme of the impossibility of a truth: "Don't visualize it." The core moment of mystery is the questioning
of our perception of reality, the questioning of reality itself.
Based on Plato's Allegory of the Cave, where the shadows on the wall become real living beings for the prisoners who have lived in the cave since birth, mystery plays with these prisoners, who become their own shadows. Whereas Plato assumes a possible realization is gained when one leaves the cave, mystery places this realization in doubt and creates additional shadow worlds – but in larger dimensions. Although the prisoners can enter these worlds, inside these worlds every apparent realization that is gained, and the self-assuredness of the protagonists regarding their surroundings and themselves are continuously dissolved – including via the deconstruction of language. They remain prisoners.
In the end, every attempt to penetrate the respective immediate and oblique surroundings only results in new and temporary shadows cast onto the limitations of our understanding.
COMPOSITION/MUSICAL DIRECTION: Helga Pogatschar (* 1966)
LIBRETTO: Achim Wagner
STAGE / LIGHT: Michael Bischoff
VIDEO: Jörg Staeger
SINGER: Monika Lichtenegger (Sopran), Christian Hilz (Bariton)
STRING QUARTET: Luciana Beleaeva (Violine), Joe Rappaport (Violine), Gunter Pretzel (Viola) und Graham Waterhouse (Violoncello)
WORLD PREMIERE:
11.-13. Mai 2012, Schwere Reiter München
