Philippe Manoury, Kein Licht

United Instruments of Lucilin started season 17-18 with « Kein Licht », an eagerly expected creation already rewarded by an international prize. The work inspired by the Fukushima disaster is the fruit of Philippe Manoury and Nicolas Stemann based on texts by Elfriede Jelinek, the author of The Piano Teacher and Nobel Prize in literature.

Thinkspiel for actors, instrumentalists and electronic music in real time based on a text by Elfriede Jelinek. Commissioned by the Opéra Comique. World premiere on 25 August 2017 as part of the Ruhrtriennale, Germany. On 11 March 2011 the eastern coast of Japan is devastated by an earthquake and the resulting tsunami. The cooling systems of the nuclear power plant in Fukushima fall off, the cores of two reactors melt. The implications are gigantic as to the role of nuclear energy policy worldwide.
Committed and moralistic, Nobel Prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek soon wrote Kein Licht, a variation of monologues expressing terror, grief, loss and anger in a highly musical writing. Nicolas Stemann is familiar with her texts which he often stages. Philippe Manoury works on the interaction between acoustics and computing and explores new forms of musical theater.
With Kein Licht, Stemann and Manoury organize a meeting between text theater and theater music composed beforehand or in real time. They offer us a visual and polyphonic reflection, which is also interactive and humorous, on the place of technology in our lives and the place of life in the face of technology.

The polyphonic text Kein Licht is a dialogue between characters lost in space and time in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Striving to reconstruct themselves, these characters exchange words of suffering, loss and tragedy, sometimes with much humor. Neither exactly an opera nor a Singspiel, Kein Licht is a “thinkspiel”, that is a play on thought. This musical production aims to make us think about the issues of our time. Theater and music will be created before you and will result from a common and live elaboration as rarely seen previously.

Music and live-electronics Philippe Manoury
Conductor Julien Leroy
Staging Nicolas Stemann
Text Elfriede Jelinek

Distribution
Sarah Maria Sun, Olivia Vermeulen, Sonja Leutwyler, Christina Daletska, Lionel Peintre singers
Caroline Peters, Katharina Schubert, Niels Bormann, Cheeky le chien actors

United Instruments of Lucilin music
Chœur du théâtre national de Zagreb Croatie choir
IRCAM electronics

Coproduction Opéra Comique Paris, IRCAM- Centre Pompidou, Ruhrtriennale, Opéra National du Rhin, Festival Musica, Théâtre National Croate de Zagreb, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, United Instruments of Lucilin and 105 individuals

Prix Fedora 2016 – Fonds de Création Lyrique – Fonds franco-allemand pour la musique contemporaine / Impuls neue Musik II

Photos: © Vincent Pontet