Wanderlust ... Die vielen Stimmen der Stadt - Deutsche Oper Berlin
What moves us
Wanderlust ... The many voices of the city
A participative youth project during the winter holidays 2022 with two presentations on 11 and 12 February 2022.
What does the city sound like? What do buildings tell? How do I locate myself in the urban polyphony of voices? The starting point of the participatory youth project WANDERLUST was to perceive the everyday environment particularly consciously and intensively. And so, on a Sunday in January, the group of young participants set out on a city walk from Neukölln to Charlottenburg, from Tempelhofer Feld to Ernst-Reuter-Platz. Under the guidance of artists from the fields of music, text, architecture and video, they walked, listened, observed and documented. The young people took all the experiences they had on the six-hour hike with them to the workshops in the Tischlerei and used them to create texts, compositions and small theatre pieces. From all these threads, a musical evening was finally woven, which will be performed tonight in the Tischlerei. WANDERLUST is a kaleidoscope of experiences and impressions that are as different as the young people themselves. Each of their personalities is reflected in the artistic contributions, sometimes presented alone, sometimes in a group, sometimes sounding purely acoustic as a recording. But also, and above all, the urban environment is heard and seen, because the project is based on the idea of changing the perspective, of understanding the non-human as an actor - and thus also letting it speak and sound in the theatre. And so, on this evening, not only young people but also trees and birds tell of life in the city, of the displacement of nature by humans, of unexpected beauty in the urban, of dealing with the pandemic and of a walk that will remain in the memory for a long time.
A walk with all senses ... From the architecture workshops
Licia Soldavini & Mascha Fehse
The expedition, conceived by constructlab as a prelude to the Wanderlust workshop, took us through landscapes with different manifestations of urbanity. The aim was to compose one of many portraits of the city of Berlin. We encountered local initiatives and garden colonies, many streets - narrow, wide, paved - the canal, former horse stables, cemeteries, a mobile wood-burning oven, the underground, postmodern towers, parks with free-roaming and caged animals. Along the way we encountered different kinds of creatures, small and large, including several humans, some accompanied by dogs, plants and bacteria. Some are considered native, others invasive, some harmless, others dangerous, all living side by side, surrounded by static and moving objects. Each of them produces its own sounds. Walking in different rhythms, sometimes blindfolded, sometimes equipped with a sound recorder or camera, we discovered the polyphony of coexistence through our senses.
The art of listening ... From the music workshops
Evelyn Saylor & Felicity Mangan
The practice of listening was a thread running through the expedition and through the following workshops in the Tischlerei. During the expedition we did listening exercises and tried, with the help of recording devices, not to take our everyday acoustic environment for granted, but to listen to it in the same way we listen to music. We recorded the sounds and were able to frame the continuous ambient sound by delimiting the recordings with a beginning and an end. In this way we brought the outside world into the concert hall and began to deconstruct the distinctions between music, sound and noise. In the working process in the following week, we engaged with the immediate experiences made on the walk and the resulting impulses. We learned compositional techniques and acquired skills in miking and audio processing with the computer. As instrumentalists, we practised listening and playing as individuals and in ensembles and made collective decisions as composers and interpreters of our own music and the works of others.
A walk through language ... From the SciFi workshops and the writing workshop
Elisa Aseva & Kuku Schrapnell
Based on the joint expedition, we went on a walk through the language together. Which situations, buildings and creatures were particularly impressive? How did we personally experience the urban environment? From this kaleidoscope of impressions, equally diverse texts emerged: Poems, dialogues, short stories and small essays. And yet all the texts share a common experience. Again and again, the city knocks on the door and makes itself felt as an overriding point of reference. Writing is often a very solitary activity, in which sometimes the outside is drawn inwards, sometimes the inside is thrown outwards. That's why we worked extensively with mutual feedback. How can the texts be brought to the stage? What are they perhaps missing? What was special? It was also always about finding the right 'special effects'. Which cogs can we turn to alienate reality and thereby sharpen our view of it?
Capturing the fleetingness of the moment ... The videos
Leonard Leesch
In using the medium of video, the aim from the beginning was not to achieve results at any price, but to capture impressions of our city walk visually and directly in close connection with music and text. It was a great pleasure for all participants to enter into a common exchange at eye level. In concrete terms, the recordings are a mixture of what we experienced together on the first Sunday walk combined with archive material from the video artist Leonard Leesch. The video productions are another layer of the shared evening, one of many elements we use as a group to express ourselves. Other elements are light, music, the texts from the workshop, the presentation of the developed results or playing in the group.
Participating young people in Winter 2022 were Lena-Anouk Bamberger, Louise Geddis, Johanna Heidemann, Cosima Kramer, Alissa Lewin, Aurelie Libowski, Luisa Lieb, Elizabeth Lügger, Sophia Menzer, Hannah Nollet, Olga Scherstnew, Felix Stähle, Hedy Veigel.
Artistic team consisted of Evelyn Saylor, Felicity Mangan [music workshops], Elisa Aseva, Kuku Schrapnell [sci-fi writing workshops], Licia Soldavini, Mascha Fehse [Constructlab - architecture workshops / city walks], Leonard Leesch [video], Evi Nakou, Katja Wischniewski [idea and concept], Carolin Müller-Dohle [dramaturgy].
The project was supported by Förderkreis of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and was funded by "Zur Bühne", the support programme of the German Stage Association within the framework of "Kultur macht stark. Bündnisse für Bildung" and is a cooperation project between the Junge Deutsche Oper, WeTeK and the Jugendclubring Berlin.
