Endless Pleasures I: Geister

This myth can be found not only in Greek antiquity in the figure of the Alcestis but also in 16th-century Chinese opera and among the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. But what if the “true love” chooses the afterlife because she can no longer stand her husband? What does her afterlife sound like then? What sounds and experiences does she encounter along the way?

GEISTER connects China with Europe; antiquity with the present; synths, beats and glowing LED cables with millennia-old Chinese instruments and shamanic songs. The audience follows Alcestis and her steps into the underworld: the surroundings of the whiteBOX become a polyphonic inferno in which the musicians are led by the pulse of an inexorable machine. Together they conjure up musical visions of the afterlife, mixed together in the “Thanatos Control Center”, where the audio signals converge and the two musical “Angels of Death”, the composer Marc Sinan and the clarinettist Oguz Büyükberber mix an orgy of sound and video collage.

Marc Sinan’s score is written over traditional music from Asia and Europe, combining it with improvisation by the virtuosic participants from China and Europe. The performance unfolds into a hypnotic, trance-like intensity through which the audience can navigate on their own. An incessantly driving beat – visible via a time code – connects the musicians at their respective locations: the algorithm has total control from which no one can escape.

Premiere on 27 March 2019 at whiteBOX, Munich, Germany.