A dark room with video projections to the right and left. Front of the stage. Persian sounds. Since the rows of seats arranged at the side are blocked, the spectators gather: inside around a wing that is exposed in the room. Leaning casually against the instrument, Golnar Shahyar intones a plaintively touching way. Now more characters emerge from the crowd, and a plot unfolds almost imperceptibly.
Two cameras track the performers, who appear projected in close-up as a dance fueled by wild music ensues. The party is suddenly interrupted: plainclothes police force the audience onto the stands with flashlights.
The director calls the play a “fictional fairy tale”
Such incidents are not uncommon in post-revolutionary Tehran. Since September 2022, the pent-up social tensions have now been unleashed in bloody protests. The demonstrators stand up for women’s rights, freedom of movement, self-determination and democracy. The music theater “Negar” by Marie-Éve Signeyrole and Keyvan Chemirani at the Deutsche Oper Berlin is now dealing with the reality of life of young people in the Iranian capital in the environment of the main character Negar (Shahyar).
Signeyrole is primarily concerned with the “question of seeing and not seeing” and sees her play as a factual fairy tale. Various perspectives are fused together and transformed into a dreamy narrative space. What is the western view of another culture? How does a person in immigration view their homeland? How does someone feel who risks everything to break up a theocratically overmolded reality of life?
Chemirani’s music also moves between the poles of distance and familiarity, in that traditional Persian elements are interpolated with baroque music, occidental musical languages or popular music in the area of composition and improvisation.
“Negar” makes an important contribution to the effort to recreate the opera format in a contemporary way. Signeyrole tries to overcome Eurocentric perspectives and to artistically integrate a variety of scenic and technical means such as projection, live video or the flexible use of space – and successfully so.
The entertaining two hours are not lost in the intoxication of effects, Chemirani’s fusion of multipolar, musical worlds works. Negar closes with the words: “I have no more love, I have no more brother.” An ending in unresolved tension. That is logical, after all the question of the future of the people in Iran remains unresolved, undecided.
Further performances on October 31 and November 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6 in the Tischlerei of the Deutsche Oper.
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Source: Tagesspiegel
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