In order to prevent a cancellation due to Corona and to still provide productive perspectives for the festival motto chosen for 2020,”Point of NEW Return,” we, as the artistic directors of the Munich Biennale of new music theater, decided already a few weeks after the beginning of the first lockdown to lead the Munich Biennale down an unusual path through the period of the pandemic. A spatial as well as temporal splitting up of the scheduled world premieres over a period of up until two years, and an allocation of the venues in Munich as well as in other cities rescued many of the productions, which will now be performed in March 2022 in Munich. And so ONCE TO BE REALISED could already celebrate its world premiere in its originally conceived form as a music theater work in January 2022 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, in advance of coming to Munich now to be performed. OPERA UND IHR DOUBLE (“OPERA AND ITS STAND-IN”), based on material from the music theater project OPERA, OPERA, OPERA, which didn’t celebrate its world premiere, will be produced in Munich as a mixed-media installation. And the world premieres of TRANSSTIMME (“TRANSVOICE”) and GROSSE REISE IN ENTGEGENGESETZTER RICHTUNG (“A GRAND JOURNEY IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION”) will be presented in specially developed film versions. As a supplement, there will be a discussion laboratory in the NEW Return format; one of the guests, among others, will be, in addition to the participants in the music theater formats that will be performed, the sociologist and journalist Heinz Bude.
We are looking forward to finally continuing the philosophy of the dynamic Biennale 2020–2022 here in Munich in these manifold formats!
Daniel Ott and Manos Tsangaris
