Y IS A QUESTION I KEEP ASKING
CREDITS:
Marie-Gabrielle Arco, Mezzo-soprano
Soriane Renaud, Soprano
Lona Mohr Villadsen, Soprano
Max van Wyck, Baritone
Wassim W. Ayass, Baritone
Actors: Kay Bretschneider, Uzay Gökhan Irmak, Max Haase, Anton Pohle, Marcelo Rodrigues, Spyros Markopoulos
Strings: Liv Colell (violin), Henrike Struck (violin), Francis Lallemang (viola), Tobias Opialla (viola), Susanne Knast (cello), Malaika Maria Möller (cello)
Glen Sheppard, Concept / Direction / Design
Lars Straehler-Pohl, Conductor
Peter May, string sextet arrangements
Fritz Polzer, Costumes / Production / Dramaturgy
Rebecca Scott, Assistant Director
Y IS A QUESTION I KEEP ASKING was an investigation into the Western operatic canon as a social and material inheritance: who has historically been permitted to produce it, inhabit it and speak through it, how that inheritance is maintained, and what happens when it is treated not as a linear history but as an exhausted, recurring space.
Made in the large warehouse gallery HB55 in Berlin-Lichtenberg, the work was constructed around three spatial transformations. In the deep background was a gay sauna with mirrored walls, populated by nine male performers in bath towels and three female singers in toiles; in the foreground, a deconstructed antiques shop contained a string sextet and conductor. The audience entered through an adjoining room into dim red light and a buried techno version of a Bach partita, passing two male performers who cruised, smoked and danced privately. An initially opaque haze gradually dissipated, revealing the figures and spaces at different distances until the audience itself became implicated in the same spatial field. The gradual revelation created a dramaturgy of recognition in which the social structures governing the performance became progressively visible.
The central image was an “eternal gay sauna” of Western culture: a closed social environment in which cultural material circulates among men, while women are repeatedly required to speak words written for them by others. The men of the sauna functioned simultaneously as authors, high priests and controllers, generating the cultural world in which the female singers operated while policing the boundaries of acceptable drama. Opposite them stood the antiquarians – the sextet and conductor – who fetishised and preserved cultural inheritance. They began clustered around objects, polishing a brass vase and touching a necklace sentimentally, as though the past itself could be maintained through ritual care. An Auden quotation supplied to the audience – “We would rather be ruined than changed” – functioned as a key to both groups.
The musical structure enacted a parallel investigation of inheritance. Recognisable operatic repertoire for female voice moved chronologically through Western musical history and then reversed towards Monteverdi, with Amanda Lear’s 'My Alphabet' as prologue and ABBA’s 'The Day Before You Came' as coda. History became not a progression but a circuit, continually returning to its origins. The female singers embodied this inherited material while the men monitored its expression, creating a dramaturgy based on the tension between authorship and embodiment.
When the drama eventually exceeded the men's threshold of control – which is to say, when the woman started to express themselves through it – the system ruptured. The male performers escaped from the sauna into the antiquarians’ world of preservation and fetishisation, before passing through the audience itself in a final act of apotheosis or perhaps liberation. The audience was thus drawn from observer into participant: the structures that produce and police cultural inheritance became part of its own spatial and social experience.
The project was less an attempt to reject the Western canon than to investigate the contradiction between its historical exclusions and its continuing capacity to produce beauty. The work treated the canon not simply as a collection of works but as a social situation: something inhabited by bodies, transmitted between people, repeated, authored, policed, fetishised and handed on. Its beauty remains, but as something bruised and compromised – a residue of a social order whose claims to authority can no longer be taken for granted.
Y IS A QUESTION I KEEP ASKING therefore used theatrical space, bodies and spectatorship to investigate cultural inheritance as something lived rather than merely represented, asking what kind of social and theatrical relationship with the canon might remain possible once its authority has been exposed.
Marie-Gabrielle Arco, Mezzo-soprano
Soriane Renaud, Soprano
Lona Mohr Villadsen, Soprano
Max van Wyck, Baritone
Wassim W. Ayass, Baritone
Actors: Kay Bretschneider, Uzay Gökhan Irmak, Max Haase, Anton Pohle, Marcelo Rodrigues, Spyros Markopoulos
Strings: Liv Colell (violin), Henrike Struck (violin), Francis Lallemang (viola), Tobias Opialla (viola), Susanne Knast (cello), Malaika Maria Möller (cello)
Glen Sheppard, Concept / Direction / Design
Lars Straehler-Pohl, Conductor
Peter May, string sextet arrangements
Fritz Polzer, Costumes / Production / Dramaturgy
Rebecca Scott, Assistant Director
Y IS A QUESTION I KEEP ASKING was an investigation into the Western operatic canon as a social and material inheritance: who has historically been permitted to produce it, inhabit it and speak through it, how that inheritance is maintained, and what happens when it is treated not as a linear history but as an exhausted, recurring space.
Made in the large warehouse gallery HB55 in Berlin-Lichtenberg, the work was constructed around three spatial transformations. In the deep background was a gay sauna with mirrored walls, populated by nine male performers in bath towels and three female singers in toiles; in the foreground, a deconstructed antiques shop contained a string sextet and conductor. The audience entered through an adjoining room into dim red light and a buried techno version of a Bach partita, passing two male performers who cruised, smoked and danced privately. An initially opaque haze gradually dissipated, revealing the figures and spaces at different distances until the audience itself became implicated in the same spatial field. The gradual revelation created a dramaturgy of recognition in which the social structures governing the performance became progressively visible.
The central image was an “eternal gay sauna” of Western culture: a closed social environment in which cultural material circulates among men, while women are repeatedly required to speak words written for them by others. The men of the sauna functioned simultaneously as authors, high priests and controllers, generating the cultural world in which the female singers operated while policing the boundaries of acceptable drama. Opposite them stood the antiquarians – the sextet and conductor – who fetishised and preserved cultural inheritance. They began clustered around objects, polishing a brass vase and touching a necklace sentimentally, as though the past itself could be maintained through ritual care. An Auden quotation supplied to the audience – “We would rather be ruined than changed” – functioned as a key to both groups.
The musical structure enacted a parallel investigation of inheritance. Recognisable operatic repertoire for female voice moved chronologically through Western musical history and then reversed towards Monteverdi, with Amanda Lear’s 'My Alphabet' as prologue and ABBA’s 'The Day Before You Came' as coda. History became not a progression but a circuit, continually returning to its origins. The female singers embodied this inherited material while the men monitored its expression, creating a dramaturgy based on the tension between authorship and embodiment.
When the drama eventually exceeded the men's threshold of control – which is to say, when the woman started to express themselves through it – the system ruptured. The male performers escaped from the sauna into the antiquarians’ world of preservation and fetishisation, before passing through the audience itself in a final act of apotheosis or perhaps liberation. The audience was thus drawn from observer into participant: the structures that produce and police cultural inheritance became part of its own spatial and social experience.
The project was less an attempt to reject the Western canon than to investigate the contradiction between its historical exclusions and its continuing capacity to produce beauty. The work treated the canon not simply as a collection of works but as a social situation: something inhabited by bodies, transmitted between people, repeated, authored, policed, fetishised and handed on. Its beauty remains, but as something bruised and compromised – a residue of a social order whose claims to authority can no longer be taken for granted.
Y IS A QUESTION I KEEP ASKING therefore used theatrical space, bodies and spectatorship to investigate cultural inheritance as something lived rather than merely represented, asking what kind of social and theatrical relationship with the canon might remain possible once its authority has been exposed.
