„I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch. What, wilt thou hear some music, my sweet love? I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let’s have the tongs and bones.“ (W. Shakespeare, Note in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream“.)
“With these four sentences of the note from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream the short, otherwise purely electro-acoustic overture of “Tongs&Bones” ends. They also remain the only movements of the piece performed in conventional language. Immediately afterwards, the stage action drifts into dream sequences: into occasionally dark but always unfathomably charming situations and into vast, strangely familiar and yet never-seen spaces – continuations in always unpredictable directions.” Stephan Winkler
Stephan Winkler has “distilled” his very own material from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Radical and at the same time miraculous departure from the original itself, but nevertheless intelligently transformed as impulse material into a comedic sphere that generates new dreams from image stories.
Been a donkey? Seduced by the fairy queen? Zettel wants to capture his enchanting Midsummer Night’s Dream and make it big – as a ballad that he is already drafting in his mind. Stephan Winkler tells it as a comic-like sequence of pictures, puts a melodious, invented language into the mouths of the dream characters and lets the imagination run wild with music.
Stephan Winkler & “Tongs & Bones”
Small music theatre without words for soprano, tenor, baritone and nine instruments based on picture stories by Jim Woodring, booklets 1&2, episodes 1-5
Commissioned work for the Taschenoper Festival Salzburg 2019
Music Stephan Winkler
Director Thierry Bruehl
Titania Annika Boos
Oberon Andreas Jankowitsch
Zettel 1 Christian Sturm
