The Salzburg Pocket Opera Festival 2023 takes a look behind the scenes of self-representation, spanning a century that has seen it all, from Max Beckmann and Sophie Calle to the present day of TikTok.
I like Max Beckmann … Sophie Calle and others
is the title of the tenth Taschenopernfestival Salzburg 2023. Behind these two names are two artists of varying degrees of fame, for whom the encirclement of identity has become a lifelong theme in different ways.
Beckmann questions his own identity through self-portraits that are multifaceted, unvarnished, revealing and exposing, like looking in a mirror.
French conceptual artist Sophie Calle focuses on the radical ‘exposure’ of a person unknown to her, using as her basis an address book that she found somewhere in Paris, which belonged to a man who was unaware of her actions and at her mercy, tracking him down by questioning the addressees. This indiscreet documentation, interpreted by Sophie Calle as an art project and ultimately published in the daily newspaper Liberation, caused a major scandal in the 1980s that continues to reverberate today.
Julia Míhaly, Oxana Omelchuk, Alvaro Carlevaro, Bernhard Gander and Stephan Winkler have been commissioned to explore this topic. In today’s ‘irritable’ and militantly hypersensitive world, which oscillates between mindfulness and the preservation of one’s own identity on the one hand and the lustful media omnipresence of one’s own significance on the other, the festival’s artistic director and director Thierry Bruehl, musical director Peter Rundel and dramaturge Hans-Peter Jahn hope to offer five very different perspectives on the discrepancies between private being and staged appearance.
New musical theatre works by Julia Míhaly, Oxana Omelchuk, Alvaro Carlevaro, Bernhard Gander and Stephan Winkler.
Musikalische Leitung Peter Rundel, Regie Thierry Bruehl.
Premiere on November 18th 2023 at SZENE Salzburg.
Galerie Taschenopernfestival 2023
