Ur-Oper #5 »Junk Press On, Magic Off: It’s Musical Time!«
In the beginning, all was night and in the darkness a cat sat in the street and whined. From the imitation of this song, opera was born: whining, noisy people on gloomy stages, singing to the imaginary moon for love and a cheese sandwich. In search of the original opera, glanz&krawall serve up exclusive morsels of their musical »CATS of BERLIN« about animals, garbage and junky relationships in the patriarchy. Because the genre musical lands absolutely unjustly in the scrap corner. In contrast to opera, it has the potential to shred the social imperative of order, cleanliness and discipline. On a discarded home organ and an armada of children’s instruments, the SCHROTTIS in their purple overalls have been lapping their way into the hearts and through the backyards of Berlin for some years now. Mixed with the meow of a lonely foam animal and a nice concert cover bone of the Ur-Schrottis, the whole thing will give a proper cat-solyanka.

Ur-Oper #4 »I want to believe« is the first mystery Ur-Opera from Helmi Theater. This opera is based on a true incident.
Father and son fight together on the side of the Republicans against the Franco regime in the Spanish Civil War. Both are convinced anarchists, who consider the freedom of man as a high good. The fight against fascism ends in defeat, and the father sees suicide as the only way to redeem himself from this hopelessness. But the 19-year-old son Jean-Luc does not think of giving up and joins the Resistance after the German invasion of France. Jean-Luc is courageous and attentive. He later wrote down his experiences in books, which were very popular in France and also in Spain in the post-war period. He is a sought-after contemporary witness. Respected historians invite him to conferences and congresses. In these meetings he also meets his future wife Lucy and their son Adam is born. Everything goes on in an orderly fashion until the 90s, as it does with all other families. At the same time he publicly emphasizes his political attitude again and again. He was and is an anarchist. A view that is no longer shared or taken seriously by many people in these late capitalist times. But then an event happens that shakes his world view but also confirms it. The grandfather Jean-Luc disappears without a trace for a week. The whole family is worried. And then he suddenly stands before them and reports an encounter of the third kind. On the way home by car, aliens would have taken him in an unknown flying object. They were very friendly, and for six days he traveled with them through space. When they left, they gave him a message that was in total agreement with his conviction. He cannot keep this experience to himself and he writes a text about it. His ancestral publishing house refuses to publish the script. They stamped this “unscientific” work as a fantasy. Also his family distances itself from his reports about the aliens. Especially his son Adam wants to have nothing to do with this matter. He is ashamed of the fact that his father is a “madman”. Only the 14 year old granddaughter Gloria is fully behind him. She wants to believe him because her grandfather is a great and kind person for her.

In Ur-Oper #3 the place of longing “Dreamtopia” comes to fruition. A woman who makes her hair beautiful every morning and finds the right outfit for the day. She rides her electric scooter to work and is very involved in her profession. Versatile are her activities, so she is a veterinarian, fashion designer, project manager, pilot, firefighter, police officer and make-up artist. A person who likes to help others in many areas of life. Whether it’s babysitting, being a good friend who just listens, or being a lifeguard on the beach. A person who works to protect dolphins. To swim, she wears a bikini. To ride, she wears fancy riding boots and a helmet. She explores the mountains with her camper. She climbs the rocks and likes to play tennis in the late afternoon, and now and then she likes to rollerblade. And in the evenings she likes to host parties where her many friends gather around her swimming pool and happily party and dance.

Ur-Oper #2 is a fairy tale: All a boy had was his lucky skin. The naked lucky skin and the desire to breathe, to live. It should go on! Merciless and gloomy: the cold river, the calls in the forest, the blind animals or even the man on the horse. Then again the evening glow, the creatures of darkness and finally the old castle. He who has nothing has nothing to lose and help often comes unexpectedly. Lucky skin never gives up and goes to hell but hell ain’t a bad place to be as a wise guy once said!

Ur-Oper #1 »Ich fühls nicht« is inspired by a comic by Swedish artist Liv Strömquist. Based on Leonardo de Caprio’s emotional burnout, it raises the dramatic question of whether the ability to love has left our midst in the face of endless choices, stress, capitalism, and self-actualization? But what does loving even mean? Isn’t everything that happened and was thought before our time toxic anyway? I don’t feel it sounds wrong and paradoxical in the opera genre, of course. In Italian opera, one rather sings of Ich fühls. But just a moment! We are not in the classical opera genre, but in the unknown world of the original opera. Perhaps the original opera explores the dark space beyond certainties? And is there any subject matter more worthy of opera than the search for love? A group of postwoken dudes with a bunch of homemade puppets, will try to rise to the challenge of somehow doing justice to this cryptic feminist work. They will have to craft many characters, we will follow the comic through time to Socrates and back to the present.