Introduction

I have the feeling that the demon could still be there. Or that it is at least troubling my consciousness. And that is why I have just been in Cameroon. So a first stop in the search for a suitable place for an African opera house. The superlative in culture has long ceased to be enough for Africa. Already in Bayreuth it struck me that opera, and Bayreuth in particular, wants to camouflage our disturbed relationship with salvation, which evidently always seems to unleash a certain group delusion, by means of theft and self-appropriation. We really are sitting in the Rhine gold, and the Rhine maidens really are already sitting on dry land. The African wound will not heal either, but it always suffices to put on show: poor Africa, poor Sahel zone, poor black children, Aids, hunger, poverty, racial hatred, etc. … it goes on and on. And I still know precisely how I almost caused Wolfgang Wagner to have a heart attack when I proved to him from Richard Wagner’s original notes that Kundry wore an ankle-length snake skirt and not a knee-length one, which would of course have referred to the European snake. So I asked my set designer Thomas Goerge to seek out someone who had already looked for proof in the previous century that the concept of opera, especially the shenanigans at Bayreuth, had been pinched. People did not go to Bayreuth in order to live, but in order to die. And therefore it was just as possible to be served in Africa, although – as my latest visit there in January 2009 again demonstrated – there in particular you are confronted with your own end, and from that derive new strength for much more high-energy things than if you had remained in Germany. And it is precisely there that I would like to locate this project which perhaps also resembles a Fitzcarraldo one. Not an impossible idea that is intended to come into being only for the sake of commercial profit, but the idea of officially pinching from Africa, and taking and deploying one’s own body for the purpose as an information vehicle, as a photographic plate. Therefore not a Goethe-touting art freak who is out to show the Afros all that German culture is capable of, but a blank European sheet that turns to Africa for further illumination. Not one or two weeks, not three or four, five or six, but up to ten weeks. That is still too little, but nonetheless better than deluding oneself that after two weeks one has already experienced enough of Africa or South America to tell Germany about its wrongs, spout to the newspapers and act as if anyone had gained anything from it.

In my project it is not about one’s own “Aren’t I great” feeling, but about the moment of infection. The moment at which I seek out a place that for once has nothing to do with Berlin, Halle, Oberhausen or Frankfurt, or places like that. And it is precisely there that the project is to be presented over and over again. Pictures, films, performances by the participants who also report on their experiences via the Internet. Thus every option, including TV broadcasts, is to be used in order to represent this idea of the hands-on physical meeting.

A festival theatre built from parts typical of the country. Perhaps too small, too much threatened by the rainy season, but precisely in its image as a symbol of this idea built back up again here too, like remains of an excavation, like the painted period of a weather-beaten dug-out canoe. The weather-beaten opera house, the echo of the infection, the spectator who first had to get to know himself, each instructing one another. And then there is also a stage for auditions and trial runs, a small boarding house where people can live, a married couple as caretakers, a small infirmary and a kitchen with a cook and his team who ensure that people do not have to go hungry.

And it is precisely there that the opera starts. Before the singing stomachs drown out everything, I want to use this idea to bring the usually social virtuoso performances on to the level of the normal. People who are hungry get things wrong, but in my eyes that would not be a failure either. Despite that, those who go down there with their theatre to practise playing “Käthchen” as well as the singers, the school-leavers who get a bursary so that they can live there for two months and above all just come there for the first time, should for the first time be provided for, as well as the many teachers there are, in Burkina Faso for example, or in Cameroon, Tanzania or Mozambique too. People with wonderful voices, wonderful art. Art that we here need urgently. It is not intended all soon to look as it does in 90% of all opera houses in Germany, or in fact in Europe or America. Ghastly singing blocks of concrete so that musical society does not grumble on hearing it. In reality that is extinction. No longer an enrichment, but concrete-mixing. And therefore I am appealing to you for this project which no doubt still sounds very obscure.

I wanted this before I fell ill. And so far it has also given me strength. Even when I collapsed in Cameroon, it was clear that I will do this project.

Since then I’ve been exercising more. I want us to cross-pollinate one another

I’d like us to discard our arrogance.

Christoph Schlingensief, 25 January 2009