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, the music theatre collective Sounding Situations, based in Hamburg and Berlin, creates a multi-perspective production about the activities of the “Wagner Group” in musical cinemascope. Together with the instrumentalists, a multi-layered and heterogeneous live composition is created. Sensitive, contemporary, Dionysian and minimal – a real-time Ring of the Nibelung in the news studio.
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 in transtraditional experiments to overcome challenges and reveal the beauty of our shared human existence. One focus of the work is the live editing of original musical material, field recordings and speech sounds which, when combined, change their original definition and become a web of sonic meanings.
