Music theater, premiered at KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen (Hannover), 7.6.2015
Duration: 100'
Heloisa Amaral, Alexandre Babel, Johannes Kreidler, Tom Pilath
Video is available in "4K"-Quality (bottom right at YouTube-Player).
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Audioguide, in the original version of over 7 hours duration, focuses in this version on the questions of beauty effects, the oversize of the media and the place of the individual. In the first part, Jacques Derrida's philosophy of art is recited against the backdrop of a differentiated society, as evidenced by the innumerable styles of metal music: "This tulip of which I speak and which I replace by speaking". The sentence refers to Immanuel Kant and his idea of disinterested pleasure, which is central to the experience of beauty. The transformation into aesthetic perception, here from the beauty of the tulip to language, is exemplary for the experience of the media. And this is discussed in the following, central talk show part on the basis of a symbolic collective experience: the visual and symbolic effect of September 11, 2001. Referring to Karlheinz Stockhausen's infamous press conference two days after the attacks, in which the avant-garde composer glorified the aesthetic character of the action in an absurd way, but did not wrongly recognize it, a theory of hyper-modern art emerges whose character is oversize, overpowering to the point of totalization, and unfeasible. Finally, the tulip also returns, for it is not only Kant's (and Derrida's) example of pure beauty, but was also the profane cause of the first modern speculative bubble in Europe, on the Dutch market in 1637: the "tulip mania". Finally, this range of themes is extended by the emotional: lovesickness, trauma and feelings of revenge are the energies that lead to action - it culminates in the cathartic destruction of 66 violins as a union of lust, pain, transgression and overwhelming. "Everything happens around a grave", Derrida is quoted once again. Then the differentiation is danced.
Audioguide is a conceptual opera, composed of small and large modules, each different, a multimedia spoken theatre with and about music, a collage of the present.
Audioguide III is a sequel of Audioguide.
