“Distant Resonance” is an artistic research project scheduled to run for three years. “Sounding Situations” is teaming up with Kampnagel, Radialsystem Berlin, the Deutsche Oper Berlin and various other institutions to explore the ways in which its own sound and sensation and story are connected to and resonate with distant locations. The first part of the “Wagner Worldwide” trilogy is set to premiere in the Tischlerei of the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

With this project Sounding Situations creates a multi-perspective music theatre about the activities of the Russian mercenary group ‘Wagner’ as a musical Echtzeit cinemascope. TikTok mythologies and Discord legends meet an uncertain present. Together with the instrumentalists, a multi-layered and heterogeneous live composition is created. Sensitive, contemporary, Dionysian and minimal — a Echtzeit Wagner in the news studio.

“Wagner Worldwide” is an attempt to illustrate the area of overlap between the activities of the Wagner mercenary group made up of Russian paramilitaries and the mythological deeds depicted by Richard Wagner. Exploring how the feelings of the public are informed by current global myths, the project aims to deconstruct these myths and set up opposing narratives. Music is provided by instrumentalists involved with, and influential within, Berlin’s alternative “Echtzeit” scene, a community whose work is known for generating compositions in the realm of overlap between reduction, minimalism, new music and post-Cage soundscapes. The assumption is that Echtzeit pieces challenge the prevailing polarising interpretation of Wagner’s works. Over the course of five scenes, “Wagner Worldwide” overlays the political research of Sounding Situations onto the musical cosmos of “Echtzeit Wagner”.

In June 2023, the mercenaries of the „Wagner Group“ marched towards Moscow and announced their intention to take power in Russia. The event was broadcasted live and commented worldwide on social media. The coup failed and the leaders of the putschists died in a plane crash shortly afterwards. The founder, a self-confessed Russian neo-Nazi, had named the group after the German composer Richard Wagner. The mercenaries described themselves as musicians, the weapons were their instruments and they saw the war as an opera.

“Sounding Situations” is a crucible for highly innovative works of musical theatre that bring together drama, music and audiences in a physical and yet imaginary space for the purpose of artistic expression. Its projects conjure up moments in which political art, topical issues, artistic magic and notions of reality and utopia meld into a multilayered opus. Since 2014, the collective consisting of Milena Kipfmüller, Klaus Janek and Jens Dietrich has been utilising language, instruments, samples, recordings and live music and edits to explore stage-based situations within the matrix of drama, composition and musical theatre. The company often pursues subversive experiments in cross-border, intercontinental and transcultural contexts, all as a way of facing down challenges and pointing up the beauty of our common human condition. One area of focus is its real-time adaptation of original works of music, on-location recordings and spoken-word audio, all of which alter their respective definitions and create a web of auditory meaning when blended together.

The new production ‘Wagner Worldwide’ by Sounding Situations is the first part of the three-year trilogy ‘Distant Resonances’. In co-productions with Kampnagel, Deutsche Oper Berlin and HfBK Hamburg, Sounding Situations is exploring how our sense of self and our own history resonate with what is far away. Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste, Hamburg – Behörde für Kultur und Musik, Rudolf Augstein Stiftung, Rusch Stiftung and Zeit Stiftung Bucerius.

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