Sieg über die Sonne

During rehearsals for Showcase Beat Le Mot's play ‘ALLES’ in 2011, the group came across several hand-typed pages of the libretto for ‘Victory over the Sun’ in a shabby rehearsal room on the outskirts of Berlin. Half jokingly, half seriously, the idea arose at that time to one day stage this ‘opera of the future,’ which premiered in St. Petersburg in 1913 and was only performed twice after its scandalous failure.

2025/26 is now the time. The fact that the work hardly exists in its original form suits Showcase Beat Le Mot very well. Many parts of the opera have been lost, so Showcase Beat Le Mot is not tempted to reconstruct it in a museum-like manner. Any reconstruction can therefore only be a transcription of its own imagination. Since the music has also been completely lost, Israeli composer Maya Dunietz is developing new music in collaboration with the soloist ensemble Kaleidoskop – not in the sense of a setting to music, but as an independent, text-independent collection of sound and noise sequences that can serve as a basis for choreographic, linguistic and vocal events.

This part is set in the present day on the opera's timeline. The past is set to music by producer Melisa Su Taşkiran's retro-futuristic Detroit techno, while Berlin-based engineer Andrej Trofimoff, who is of Russian origin, develops neo-primitive instruments for the future. Visual artist Knut Klaßen, with whom Showcase Beat Le Mot has already collaborated successfully on the conceptual projects ‘1000 Things Falling’ and ‘The Top Five Letters of Liaisons Dangereuses’, designs fabrics that are woven into a three-dimensional net/image and are in constant motion.

From the outset, the opera ‘Victory over the Sun’ was conceived as a core collaboration between Showcase Beat Le Mot, HAU-Hebbel am Ufer Berlin and the Estonian-Russian ensemble of the Von Krahl Theatre Tallinn.