«Layers News Opera» :: Première

«Layers News Opera» is our emotional response to the dictatorship of the daily flood of news – which we are dispensing of with the establishment of an artistic platform for officially fictional facts.

In opera, an illusion is visualised. In the news, something ostensibly real or current becomes an illusion through its being reported. The news works with the same attractors as classical theatre, with «fear and mercy», but is presented as though it dealt with reality – although it is only the illusion of this.

We are making the illusion of reality into a really existing illusion. With the help of a newsreader from the television station RBB, we are projecting news images and news on a foundation of new music.

We are broadcasting back – and showing nothing but the whole truth.

The question of how and whether our semiotic systems can tell us something about the world, or if they do not at the same time pervert our view of it, is a central motive of our work on «Layers News Opera»: an epistemological investigation of the devices of theatre (and the mass media) with the devices of theatre. The eponymous process is here a comparative one: like layers, we stack the art forms involved in our opera (image, music, word etc.) on top of one another to test perception in the experiment playfully and searchingly. At the same time, this enables us to set our sights on the effects of the arts and theatrical devices.

The working principle here is decentralized, non-hierarchical: we want and desire mutual influence, encounters, and overlappings, giving rise to a new and unique work of art: «Layers News Opera».

«Layers News Opera» was awarded the project realisation prize operare 08. Operare is a project of the Zeitgenössische Oper Berlin in association with the Academy of Arts, within the framework of ohrenstrand.net. ohrenstrand.net is supported by the Netzwerk Neue Musik, a funding project of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, and the cultural management of the federal state of Berlin. Layers News Opera is produced with the kind support of Pfefferwerk Stadtkultur gGmbH, event technology and management, and Aedes East – International Forum for Contemporary Architecture, in association with the Academy of Arts, studio for electroacoustic music.