You are on page 1of 11

Opera/Libretto Symposium - Barcelona, 26-27th June 2011 - pera de Butxaca i Noves Creacions

Dr. Pieter Verstraete Post-Migrant Community Opera?

Today I would like to speak about a new research, which is about what I call post-migrant opera. Perhaps it would better be called multicultural or community opera. The latter term has earned some currency in the Netherlands in recent years through such festivals as Yo! Opera. The term post-migrant has also a particular history and function in Germany, particularly in the Naunynkiez in Neuklln. However, I am convinced that the aspect of post-migration is also relevant for these music theatre performances, because they indirectly seek to contribute to an increased representation and presence of people with a migration background in the art scene, as well as to an awareness of alternative perspectives on Europes migration history of the past 50 years. Similar initiatives can be seen in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Sweden, but also to an extent in Belgium, and maybe you know of similar projects elsewhere. This art form includes collaboration with people in post-migrant communities as well as artists with a migration background in the artistic process. Some of these initiatives have developed from migrant theatre; and a lot differs, artistically, organizationally and dramaturgically, when directors or artists with no migration background initiate such projects. I will explain this later. I will be mainly speaking about two projects today. But I first wanted to start with a project from the 90s, to show a tentative prehistory that paved the way for this art form and also problematizes it. I dont know if you know a little bit about the Belgian theatre scene but one of the largest music theatre companies today is called LOD; it used to be Muziek LOD, with L.O.D. referring to Lunch on Thursday but they have forgotten about that now, [audience laughter]. It is one of the most successful Flemish theatre companies besides Muziektheater Transparant with which they often collaborate. 1

Opera/Libretto Symposium - Barcelona, 26-27th June 2011 - pera de Butxaca i Noves Creacions

LOD initially started from a story-telling theatre and they included music from very early on to explore the narrative potential, or in other words, to tell stories through music. Interestingly enough, one of the first projects that they realized as the departure point to become a music theatre ensemble was Allons les Gars, which literally means: Lets do it, guys. Lets make something. Lets go. On stage were only children, playing music and acting together as a band. Not only did this new music theatre in its infancy define itself in relation to the future, it also gave a direction of the new audiences it was looking for. Significantly, the children were a mixture of Flemish and Belgian-Turkish identities. So for LOD, multiculturalism created the pivot for the new music theatre that was then alternative, but now mainstream. It is what I call the music theatre of the third wave. In the twentieth century, one could see largely three waves of music theatre. You have one in the 1910s in a still modernist tradition, with Stravinsky, Schoenberg and the like. Then you have a period of growth in the 1950s and 60s, with Berio and Stockhausen among others. And then in the 1980s, there is a reinvention of music theatre in a very specific way, moving away from the modernist tradition with its Orientalist tendencies towards a postmodernist style and approach that would allow including again the broader society. In that sense, it is very close to the development of post-dramatic theatre in Europe, because it is responding to a legacy of music theatre and opera in a similar way as theatre did in response to its past and repertoire. This music theatre generally included all sorts of media and new forms of performance. And this is basically where we are now. Within this third wave of music theatre, LOD kicks off in 1991 with a performance, which reflects the multicultural society, with children born in Belgium but with a migration background. It presented itself as a very joyful parade: the children are enjoying themselves, despite that the music was also a bit difficult and composed by Dick van der Harst. Characteristic to this composer is the blend of different musical cultures. He used Turkish instruments, such as the sas and oud, and musical modalities that also stem from a Turkish tradition.

Opera/Libretto Symposium - Barcelona, 26-27th June 2011 - pera de Butxaca i Noves Creacions

From that performance, I sadly cannot show you anything more than a newspaper clipping. But in the picture of this review you can see an image of a tree, which falls down during the performance (inspired by a Tarkovsky film). The tree falls down and the children try to resurrect it from the floor. I find this an interesting metaphor. I have tried to understand from the critics at the time how they made sense of what they experienced, and there are very different interpretations. I have my own: I think you can see this tree as music theatre in itself, that is trying to reject or resist its operatic, institutionalized past by tearing its trunk down, but then it also resurrects again by recycling some of the operatic mechanisms to create a new, more open music theatre. Question is, however, for all its innocence, how much of the old operatic past and thereby, the hegemonic culture has been recycled by the Dutch-born composer (of a father from Dutchcolonized Indonesia), to which the joyous youthful parade responds in all its imperfections. To what extent is the harmony really reflecting a multicultural reality, where children learn from each other, or rather a colonizing vision and a cultural conditioning in the head of the mastergenius? This is a very important question one should ask dramaturgically. This first performance by LOD demonstrates a first, interesting way of how this new music theatre relates to opera and the past, as well as to the multicultural reality of a new generation. Music theatre offers a point of view, which is more open towards alternative ways of musical narrative and drama. In this way, they create a new perspective on opera and its history, but it can equally open new perspectives on the multicultural society. This is just to show you a departure point for the multicultural impetus within the development of what is now mainstream music theatre. With this, I introduced how the inclusion of the multicultural society today challenges opera dramaturgy, and particularly how we make and interpret librettos and compositions in this cultural environment. The question of dramaturgy is foremost an aesthetical one, so I am focusing on aesthetic mechanisms that are at work within those 3

Opera/Libretto Symposium - Barcelona, 26-27th June 2011 - pera de Butxaca i Noves Creacions

performances. But in order to understand those aesthetic mechanisms, one cannot separate them from the social and historical aspects, because of the nature of these productions. The performances I will talk about today are De Lege Wieg or in Turkish, Bos Besik, which means the Empty Cradle in English, and which was directed by the Dutch director Cilia Hogerzeil (Zwolle) for Hollands Diep in collaboration with VocaalLAB in the Netherlands. The cultural sector, and particular the multicultural initiatives, within the political climate of this country are at great risk at the moment; so this might have been one of the performances that would probably not have made it, if the cuts were really final. I surely hope not! The second performance I want to discuss will be Tango Trk, which is directed by Lotte de Beer, also a Dutch theatre practitioner who made this performance for the Neukllner Oper in Berlin. Lets start with Bos Besik. Before we see the performance, I will just let one of the performers talk, singer-actor Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson (Hamburg, 1969) who plays the protagonist, Nomad. He will introduce the story of the performance: [Fragment] I would describe Nomad as a Romantic rebel, about twenty years old, who is still locked under the power of his mother. He is so much in love with Fadime, and its a kind of Romeo and Juliet story. We try to come together and we are so much in love, but our clans dont get along very well; and my mother is totally against it. Im always switching between my mother and Fadime. We had quite a hard time to learn the score because it was quite late and now we are the last people in the chain of work and we have to catch up. That is why the stage rehearsals are quite often interrupted and the parts have hardly been learned by heart yet, but I think in the end it will turn out fine. And the Turkish womens choir, they are so enthusiastic... Also because the story meets their lives, its an old Turkish folktale so theres a connection with their roots. I can say its a fresh and enthusiastic atmosphere. And they are great, a great sound as well, the choir. 4

Opera/Libretto Symposium - Barcelona, 26-27th June 2011 - pera de Butxaca i Noves Creacions

There are a few interesting points here to make: you see, on the one hand, this high-trained singer with a half-Turkish migration background he was schooled between 1996 and 2001 in the Hochschule fr Knste in Bremen with Maria Kowollik and on the other hand, theres the choir of women, not classically schooled, who are from the Dordrecht community of Turkish and Kurdish families, some in a first, others in a second generation. They women have been included in the project from day one of the creative process. The team of the Dutch music theatre company Hollands Diep organized intensive workshops with them, and then slowly, from learning how they sing and how they experience music, they built up the opera. Central to the production is a Turkish narrative that is still vivid in most of the participants minds. The story of Bos Besik goes that a woman, Fadime, marries a man, Nomad, much against the will of the families; after the marriage, it is very important for Nomads family that she produces a baby. This is of course a tradition that many cultures share, but it is a very crucial cultural theme. So then enters the problem: Fadime cannot get pregnant. However, by some magical power and some dramatic switch, she receives a baby. By a strike of faith, she loses the child later again. The story is based upon a folktale from presumably around the sixteenth century from the area of the Taurus Mountains in southern Anatolia, but there were also popular film versions in 1965 and 1969, which are more known. It is not insignificant that the story is inherent to the shared cultural memory among people with a Turkish or Kurdish migration background and that this is now being communicated in a Dutch setting for opera and music theatre aficionados, but equally for the Dutch-Turkish and Dutch-Kurdish communities who generally have little access to opera. In its address to the post-migrant communities, the project can be significant for a second and third generation, as the Turkish and Kurdish cultural heritages of the first generation have been largely taken over by the hegemonic Dutch culture. So it is not just that one knows the story and that the production helps to see it with different eyes. Some of the people hear about it for the first time together with the non-migrant audiences in the Netherlands. 5

Opera/Libretto Symposium - Barcelona, 26-27th June 2011 - pera de Butxaca i Noves Creacions

Next is Tango Trk by the Neukllner Oper. [Fragment, commented:] We see here on the stage of Tango Trk at the Neukllner Oper an older man from the first generation, who fled from Turkey to Germany in the 1980s. He is a trade unionist, and talks about the 1980s coup dtat. He was demonstrating whilst putting up posters. After the coup dtat most of the Leftists and revolutionaries fled the country. Besides them, the Family Reunion law that was passed in 1974 (but later amended) also made Turkish citizens to emigrate to Germany, the Netherlands or Belgium and create their own businesses from scratch. After this small intervention of documentary theatre through personal testimony, where there is somebody from the first generation, who stands up and speaks about the political situation of the 1980s, we get a representation of the social turmoil on stage. We meet here the protagonist Cihan, who is a typical German-Turkish cosmopolitan citizen who is into Internet businesses and he is also in denial about his past; he initially does not want to know anything about the history of his mother in Turkey. The presence of family members in Turkey and Germany, as well as the individualistic life in Germany, made his family dysfunctional. But upon the death of his mother, which is the catalyst of the drama, he is confronted to reflect upon the family history and himself in relation to it. In this scene, he actually re-enacts his fathers choice to flee to Germany. In this way, you see a split between him as a contemporary German with Turkish roots (the son of his mother), and a reflection of him as his unknown father who was in the midst of the political, volatile situation of the 1980s, in which lies the origin of his life situation today. This scene comes with a Turkish tango song arranged by Turkish composer Sinem Altan. It says significantly: Your gaze is not mine anymore. It belongs to somebody else, somebody elses heart. What Sinem Altans composition does, besides driving the narrative, is to decompose Western and Eastern musical traditions. It tries to negotiate between those compositional traditions but also between listening habits and expectations of a hybrid, multicultural audience. Turkish traditional music itself and I will give an example later was 6

Opera/Libretto Symposium - Barcelona, 26-27th June 2011 - pera de Butxaca i Noves Creacions

historically not polyphonic; it is generally monovocal with accompaniment, and it is rich in tonalities, semi-tones but also includes a wide array of styles and ethnic influences. Tango Trk, however, is genuinely Turkish music from the 1920s with polyvocal and polyphonic arrangement taken from the tango traditions of Buenos Aires in Argentina. It pairs Occidental and Orientalist musical modalities together. More about this later. The Turkish composer Sinem Altan (1985, Ankara) has received her music education in Germany, at the Hans Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin. She has been a composer in residence of the Neukllner Oper since 2008 and this is her second project. She plays a significant role in an ongoing research of the Neukllner Oper to reach out to the German-Turkish communities in the direct vicinity; sometimes the projects deal with topics directly related to Germanys multicultural society, but they are equally about other topics in the interest of its audiences. I think this is significant because what Tango Trk tries to do is not only to try to reach out to a local community around the Neukllner Oper, to tell the stories of the community, but also to share them with a larger audience on socio-cultural terms. It is a music theatre that tries to reinvent and re-establish the social commitment of opera, because, concomitant to music theatres intentions to reject traditional opera, opera has undergone a deflation of its meaning. This has created a productive void for opera as a label, which can be refilled with new meanings and artistic expressions again, that can speak, in a social sense, to communities and people who have little or no history with opera. At venues such as Neukllner Oper you see that through music theatres perspective, opera is seeking new audiences, in the same way that the new music theatre did in the 1980s. Question here remains if the search for new audiences and the rejuvenating of opera is not overshadowing the noble aims to represent stories of people with a migration background on stage. Both projects which I discussed Bos Besik which stands in a modernist operatic tradition, and Tango Trk which is music theatre in the third wave actually reproduce stereotypes of the idea of opera,

Opera/Libretto Symposium - Barcelona, 26-27th June 2011 - pera de Butxaca i Noves Creacions

and thereby the hegemonic European cultures, to the extent that the audience members perceive them as such, or to the extent that it makes artists of colour dependent on the economic demands to appropriate this European art form. Conversely, these projects tune into the collective and individual memories of post-migrants at the moment when these memories are fading or have been superseded. The search for identity through aesthetic and discursive negotiations of tradition and contemporary forms of music and performance practice, as well as of ones shared history, in these projects plays a significant part in this. Past Opera in Turkey: Coming to Terms with Modernization? A relevant dramaturgical approach would need to encompass how people relate to these newly emerging forms of opera today. For this purpose, I believe we also should consider how opera operated historically in Turkey. It was long part of a nationalistic strategy, which increased under Mustafa Kemal Atatrk but started under the Ottomans by the end of the 19th century. Opera was part of a modernization and mainly westernization process, to alienate the more native traditions from art and thus also its participants. Westernization and modernization were used to impose what the standards of good taste were, and thereby also to reinforce what was happening in Turkey around that time in terms of its growing national economy which was based on foreign investments. There were also a lot of foreigners working in trade and political diplomacy in Istanbul, particularly French but also Germans. Art played a particular function in attracting foreign capital. In order to distinguish oneself and associate oneself with a higher class one had to act in a European or Western way. In this sense, it is understandable that opera was never really accepted in Turkey, despite a wave of Turkish operetta, particularly in film. Today, Turkey has about seven professional opera houses but some of them are in a permanent state of decay, also in the collective consciousness. With Turkey becoming more culturally influential in the twenty-first century, new festivals are created in the wake of the 8

Opera/Libretto Symposium - Barcelona, 26-27th June 2011 - pera de Butxaca i Noves Creacions

European Capital of Culture 2010 celebrations in Istanbul. But opera was always seen as a kind of disheartening art form, as a form that was not Turkish, not native; it was from the West. And in that sense, you could see the post-migrant forms of music theatre in Europe as a way of coming to terms with this history of modernization and westernization, which is based on colonial imperialism. This creates an interesting paradox, because, despite its inherence in modernist theatre, opera and music theatre can express hybrid identities very well due to its flexibility and mobility: it is much more possible to express through music what is very close to how we experience or identify ourselves, our postmodern subjectivity, than with words. So it does make sense that theatre practitioners as well as composers with a migration background would work with this in essence very Western art form, with a reflective distance to it. As such, despite or perhaps due to its institutional framework, EuropeanTurkish opera and music theatre projects could give voice to people and communities with a migration background, from within the hegemonic structure; and with that comes also a consciousness of social class and exclusion. In engaging with this art form, postmigrant artists become more visible within the middle class society. But the question remains if this contributes to a more increased and normalized representation of artists of colour in the theatre and opera infrastructure. As a way to end my questions of a dramaturgy that is tuned to the multicultural reality, I would like to show you another clip from Tango Trk. I am showing you the end, which includes the Tango Trk song. [Fragment] The lyrics here are significant: That is why I could not embrace you, could not live your longing/ a bitter adventure it is, they have taken him from me/ He is the love of someone else, who is now happy/ my soul has again become a land in ruins. The land in ruins operates as a metaphor for the entire performance. The libretto tells the story in a fragmentary way, with flashbacks, and it is up to the spectator through this episodic structure to recreate the narrative line chronologically; but there is always a sense of linearity 9

Opera/Libretto Symposium - Barcelona, 26-27th June 2011 - pera de Butxaca i Noves Creacions

and genealogy within that fragmentation. The fragmentation is significant, especially when you think of migrant families living partly in Turkey and in Germany or across Europe. So there is this idea of a fragmented family or fragmented subjectivity in the performance and in how people relate to themselves and their relation to the past. Tango music brings in another interesting aspect. The theme song in Tango Trk is one of the first genuine Turkish tango pieces from 1928. Tango became part of that same mechanism, as I just explained to you, of a new political and social culture, which historians have identified as Atatrks ballroom diplomacy. It refers to the numerous diplomatic receptions that were held at the Ankara Palace Hotel. Tango music was then seen as a Western art form; but it did not receive the same connotations as opera today. It was appropriated, because it connected very well with the indigenous themes and the Arabesque, emotional music that they had in folkloric music. Although the meter was Western, the topics of the songs were very Turkish, and like the text of the Tango Trk song, very Arabesque. Dramaturgically, you can read the lyrics in at least two ways: you can understand the song within the personal story of Cihan, who now belongs to another country, Germany, and not to the homeland anymore; but you can also see it in a more political and historical sense of a community of Turks that belongs somewhere else. Despite a perhaps vague feeling of belonging to the homeland, they are now in a new place. So there is a connection between the personal story, the very individualistic story of German Turks in Germany, but also a collective and cultural mechanism that is at work here. The music is also very telling, because tango today is becoming very popular with the younger generation: they do not regard it as a Western art form that was part of a colonial past as such. And I think this has been reinforced by the awareness that tango is a hybrid music form. Today, this form is re-approriated by the young in Turkey as part of a new socialization and gender awareness. Tango music responds to those contemporary social impulses.

10

Opera/Libretto Symposium - Barcelona, 26-27th June 2011 - pera de Butxaca i Noves Creacions

So, in this way, tango music is used as a conveyor to communicate across communities and cultures. If I can give you just a little idea from Music Sociology, Simon Frith says: Our experience of music, and music making and music listening is best understood as an experience of a self in process. Music like identity is both performance and story. It describes the social in the individual and the individual in the social, the mind in the body and the body in the mind. Identity like music is both a matter of ethics and aesthetics. I think this explains one of the main aesthetic mechanisms of Tango Trk. Just to end with a discussion point: is cultural convergence possible through music? Can we bring the cultures together or are we dealing here with another colonization through the senses? This question, which should inform our dramaturgical approach, appears at this moment of cultural adaptation in the performance, which touches upon a feeling of nostalgia. In Turkish, this feeling is called hzn or hznl (meaning, with nostalgia, in a collective sense), which has played a significant role in Turkish identity. Tango Trks music teaches us that, though as outsiders we do not have immediate access to what hzn means culturally and socially, we can still share similar feelings with this music, and then there is a moment when a meeting can start to happen. Thank you!

11

You might also like