What does Richard have to do with Russian mercenaries? Music theatre collective Sounding Situations creates a richly multilayered live composition about the activities of the “Wagner Group”.
In June 2023, the »Wagner Group« mercenaries marched on Moscow and announced their intention to take power in Russia. 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.
With WAGNER WELTWEIT, Berlin and Hamburg based Sounding Situations creates a heterogeneous music theatre about the activities of the “Wagner Group” in musical cinemascope. Together with the instrumentalists, a multi-layered live composition is created. Sensitive, contemporary, Dionysian and minimal – a Echtzeit Ring of the Nibelung in the news studio.
Both Dionysian and minimalist in its approach, “Wagner Worldwide” plays with the overlap between the Wagner Group’s activities and mythologies surrounding German composer Richard Wagner. Geopolitical myths that inform public perception are deconstructed — counternarratives brought to light. The project’s music is created by instrumentalists from Berlin’s alternative “Echtzeit” scene, known for compositions that merge reduction, minimalism, new music and post-Cage soundscapes. Their creations challenge the prevailing polarizing interpretation of Wagner’s works.
Over the course of five scenes, the political research carried out by Sounding Situations lays the ground for a musical “Echtzeit” cosmos, where TikTok mythologies alternate with Discord legends in a prime-time newsroom.
Sounding Situations develops highly innovative music theatre in which theatre, music and audience meet in a physical and imaginary space for artistic actions. Their projects create moments in which political art, current issues in our society, reality, utopia and artistic magic merge into a multi-layered work of art.
The collective, consisting of Milena Kipfmüller, Klaus Janek and Jens Dietrich, has been exploring theatrical situations between music theatre, staging and composition with live music, instruments, recordings, samples, speech and live editing since 2014. The group often works between countries, continents and cultural borders. One focus of the work is the live editing of original musical material, field recordings and speech sounds which, creating a web of sonic meanings.
