To each his own opera!

EXPANDED CONCEPT OF OPERA

The Festspielhaus Afrika is a long-term initiative encouraging individual initiative which springs from an expanded concept of opera. In the endeavour to resocialise European high culture, the Festspielhaus Afrika functions as an organ that restores circulation between opera and its original environment. Thus opera can again extend its own concept to the political and social sphere, as it did for example in the case of the legendary production of Auber’s opera The Dumb Girl of Portici in Brussels in 1830 when the people entered into a direct verbal dialogue with the words of the opera. The opera kindled such tremendous emotions that the audience left the theatre in the second act and set off the civil revolution in the streets.

Festspielhaus Afrika liberates the colony of opera from its current torpor, apprehending it as a living vessel with holes that takes in from its surroundings and gives out to its surroundings. This process is compelling, for opera can generate only as much strength in  the political and social sphere as it has drawn in, and the social and political environment can only receive as much as it has put in.

This assignment of opera into its organic cycle corresponds with the prospect of a long overdue new kind of development aid for Africa that not only distributes, but also takes, and therefore likewise perceives itself as part of a shared cycle. There is another possibility than that of comprehending development aid solely as a linear transfer from the First World to the Third, as the Festspielhaus Afrika will exemplarily demonstrate. In an organic cycle giving and taking are expanded, the frontiers that by definition make the suffering into the suffering and aid workers into aid workers are broken asunder.

Now is the time to invest in Africa by exploiting it on the spot and using its wealth.

Artists from different contexts must be able to see the possibility of apprehending opera as a process and Africa as a workshop, not primarily as vaccinated guests, but as people infected and organically integrated into the surrounding area by Festspielhaus Afrika. Everyone should be able to design their life socially and artistically, the indigenous people too, who as a result of sustained exploitation turned into recipients of aid. They are released from the position at the end of the line at which they normally receive aid from the First World, and can be integrated into the organic process that they themselves fashion through collaboration in the realisation of the Festspielhaus Afrika. The suffering become an active component of the cycle, of the living organism.