Semele Walk

Baroque is the tendency to exaggeration, to pomp and extravagance. Baroque is a provocative reordering of old laws and conditions, a confusing game between being and appearances, a dissolution of boundaries. Baroque is an attitude to life between lust for life and fear of death in a time of upheaval. Baroque is unbridled passion, is intoxication, is permeated by an atmosphere of latent eroticism, is rebellion against the cool aesthetics of the Renaissance.

Vivienne Westwood stands for the consistent breaking of conventions in the fashion world, for pure individualism, for eccentric combinations of the most diverse fashion styles, for a creative eclecticism in dealing with historical models, for the combination of fashion with clear political convictions, for a provocative mixing of genres and genders.

The oratorio Semele by George Frideric Handel, first performed in London in 1744, is the starting point for this production. Semele is obsessed with the pleasure of borderline experience. In her delusion of attaining immortality, she demands that her divine lover appear to her in his true form. She burns in its glistening light. From the ashes of Semele, Jupiter rescues the fruit of this fatal union: Dionysus. Semele stands for the longing for another emotional state, that of the Dionysian, the irrational, subversive, ecstatic, self-destructive. Semele burns on her unleashed passion and is at the same time proof that a society that banishes the Dionysian has no right to exist.

Semele Walk is an evening about dissolution and ecstasy, a musical-theatrical performance in which Ludger Engels lets the baroque figure of Semele meet the fashion world of Vivienne Westwood. Starting from a classical fashion show, the catwalk develops into a 'catwalk of feelings', where the longing for the unconditionally passionate, for the combination of ecstasy and subversion leads to rebellion against a static, rational world.