Hasti Molavian
Hasti Molavian, this year in the pocket opera “Souris – A true faker is a great faker is a mystery maker!” by Julia Mihály.
As a classically trained singer, Hasti Molavian is stuck in a box that is far too narrow for her. Born in Tehran, she played as a violinist in various chamber orchestras for several years in her youth and her enormous curiosity drove her to study in Germany, where she studied vocal music theater with Prof. Rachel Robins at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen and completed her Master’s degree in Voice Performance. During her studies, she received the NRW Scholarship, the Germany Scholarship and scholarships from the Walter and Charlotte Hamel Foundation. From the very beginning of her studies, she overcame her divisionist thinking and as a result created works in the field of dance with VA Wölfl and the Ben J. Riepe Company, among others. One focus of Hasti’s work is contemporary music.
At the Ruhrtriennale, she was involved in Samir Odeh-Tamimi’s Leila und Madschun, Carl Orff’s Prometheus, Helmut Lachenmann’s Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Careé and various works by Luigi Nono, among others. From 2011 to 2015, Hasti was a member of the Dortmund Opera Studio. From 2015 to 2020, she was a member of the ensemble at Theater Bielefeld. Further engagements have taken her to the Theater an der Wien, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Herkulessaal Munich, the Tonhalle Düsseldorf, the Philharmonie Essen, Bonn Opera, Theater Bremen, Theater Münster, Theater Osnabrück, Theater Hagen and Puppentheater Halle. Hasti has worked with directors such as Willy Decker, Stefan Kaegi, Lemi Ponifasio, Robert Wilson, Claudia Bauer, Kay Voges, Paul-Georg Dittrich and conductors such as Peter Rundel, Emilio Pomàrico, Steven Sloane, Sylvain Cambreling and Michael Boder. The feeling of being unheard remained: as a permanent member of the ensemble at various opera houses, she was sometimes too eager to perform, sometimes too interested in new music, sometimes questioned Western conventions too much. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, she was named in the critics’ poll in the category Best Singer of the 16/17 season in NRW for her portrayal of Charlotte (in Charlotte Salomon by Marc-André Dalbavie) at Theater Bielefeld and in the Dortmund production of Einstein on the beach by Philip Glass in the Welt am Sonntag edition. She also received the 2018 NRW State Prize in the theater category.
She has been working at the Volkstheater Wien since the 2020/21 season and the opera singer has become an artist that many find hard to grasp, because she firmly believes that the future of theater lies precisely in what she is at its core: being fluid and exploring boundaries.
