lecture performance on contemporary music theater
June 28 at Athens Epidaurus Festival
At one point, Paul Klee talks about what it would be like to draw as if no one had ever made a stroke before.
So I imagine entering a room as if I had never been in one before, and writing and staging musical theatre – we don't have to call it that – as if the world had just been invented and we needed an instrument to explore it anew. Everything becomes elementary material, every light, every appearance, every sound, every figure.
Larger syntactic units arise from the interplay, the comparison, the mutual exploration of the dimensions of things and their forms of expression.
Some things are reminiscent of a wheel when a wheel is reinvented. Yes, at a certain point we should remember that we have already learned to speak and are constantly reinventing these skills.
And yet the space now seems different to us than ever before... and different again.
Its creation is linked to its composition. Music is the whole – we are welcome to call it something else. Our theatre makes visible, theatron, that which allows us to see. This appeals to intuition, from in tuere, ‘to look carefully’. So we take the time to look carefully at this composed space and discover the figures in it that begin to sing, speak and play within us. The space that flows through us as we hear and see it is the space of a narrative that begins here and does not know where it will end.
(Manos Tsangaris)