presents
Collision a ‘comic opera in banalities’ by Kurt Schwitters (1928) with music by Lewis Coenen-Rowe (2016) ABOUT THE SHOW
“Collision is ahead of us. The end of the world is near.”
Collision is an irreverent cabaret-opera which started life in 1928 as a Dada-esque libretto by avant- garde artist Kurt Schwitters. With a strange Green Globe on course to collide with Earth, panic is rife on the streets of Berlin. Between the broadcasting station and the church, the action swings from hyperactive farce to nihilistic satire until the citizens of Berlin find themselves at the airport for the final curtain.
Part absurdist science-fiction and part sultry cabaret, Collision was Schwitters' first and only foray into the opera world, and it was never realised during his lifetime. 90 years on, Spectra Ensemble recreates Collision as a fully-staged 'comic opera in banalities' set to new cabaret and jazz-influenced music by Lewis Coenen-Rowe, and with a set inspired by Schwitters' own brand of collage art.
Schwitters, (Difficult), 1943 Background
Kurt Schwitters was one of the twentieth century’s seminal proponents of avant-garde art. Born in Hanover in 1887, he made his name just after the First World War as the producer of his very own brand of Dadaism, Merz. A play on both the German word Commerz and the French merde, meaning ‘shit’, Merz was Schwitters’ technique of making art from rubbish. His Merzbau, - ‘a cathedral of erotic misery’ - was testament to his use of Merz as a way of life: this structure gradually took over the second floor of his home, an architectural oddity comprised, again, mostly of rubbish. The immersive, all-encompassing Merz project sought to turn not only visual art on its head, but opera too.
Schwitters produced Collision in 1928 at the height of his Merz fascination; just as the Weimar Republic was beginning to weaken and fights between different political factions were breaking out onto the streets. Collision reflects on the period of chaos and hyperinflation in the early 1920s and forms an uncanny prophecy for Germany’s fascist future, as well as more recent political and economic crises. Collision in the 21st Century
“Presumably, nothing much will change things far. Presumably, things will be as they were before. Presumably, the good old earth is just a star. Presumably, collision wipes us off the calendar.”
Collision, whilst very much of its time, helps us to understand our own – hardly surprising given that one of its main subjects is the triumph of stasis over progress. A hundred years on from the founding of the Dada movement, the appetite for German avant-garde art is still ripe. Visual artists such as Otto Dix and Max Ernst continue to capture the popular imagination, whilst the music-hall style of the period lives on in the Weimar cabaret of Kurt Weill and Mischa Spoliansky.
Schwitters’ pioneering use of the collage form inspired much of the pop art of the 1950s and 1960s, from Richard Hamilton to Peter Blake. Having been interned in a camp on the Isle of Man during the Second World War, he is of particular interest in Britain: on his release, he settled in London and became part of the art scene. The enemy alien Schwitters ended up spending the last years of his life in sedate Lake District hamlet Little Langdale.
With this piece, Spectra Ensemble aims to investigate the relationship between Schwitters’ sculptural and performative works, a question raised but not fully answered by the 2013 Tate exhibition ‘Schwitters in Britain’. The creative team will take inspiration from Schwitters' extraordinary assemblages and installation pieces to bring Collision to life in a version that is as arresting visually as it is thematically.
Reconstruction of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau in Hanover
ABOUT SPECTRA ENSEMBLE
Founded at Oxford University in 2015, Spectra Ensemble is a collective of artists wholly committed to multimedia performance. The team's appetite for the unperformed and unperformable fosters both contemporary practice and the designs and concepts belonging to the multimedia visionaries of the past.
Spectra Ensemble seeks to explore the legacy of modernism and its present-day reception, and to stretch the parameters of opera and dance by engaging simultaneously with the sonic, visual, spatial and kinetic realities of a work throughout the creative process.
The company’s works challenge the conventional divisions between theatre, concert hall and museum spaces in pursuit of a total and immersive multimedia experience. Its debut production in May 2015 was Performing Colour/Staging Sound at Oxford’s Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, a version of Kandinsky’s The Yellow Sound which was shortlisted for King’s College London’s Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Responses to Modernism.
Spectra Ensemble’s sophomore show, Liturgie, enjoyed a sell-out run in December 2016, and marked the world premiere of a ballet-opera conceived by Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes collaborators in 1916. The production combined designs drawn from Natalia Goncharova's plans with new music by Daniel Lee Chappell and new choreography by Camille Jetzer.
Collision will further Spectra Ensemble’s ambitions towards cross-disciplinary and cross-temporal collaboration, demonstrating the creative possibilities of reengagement with an unfinished historical work.
Liturgie, 2016
Production Team
CECILIA STINTON | DIRECTOR Cecilia holds a BA in Music and an MSt in History of Art from Oxford University, and is currently reading for an AHRC-funded PhD in History of Art at University College London. She worked for two years at the Ashmolean Museum programming large-scale participatory events, and has since gained experience directing opera with Helios Collective and Oxford Opera, as well as assisting at Opera Holland Park, Garsington Opera and British Youth Opera.
LEWIS COENEN-ROWE | COMPOSER Lewis is a composer who has worked with the Oxford Philomusica, the BBC Singers, the New Music Players, Ensemble ANIMA, the Cavaleri Quartet, Mark Simpson, Jonathan Powell and Richard Casey, as well as collaborating in the foundation of various projects including the RendezVous concert series. Lewis holds a BA in Music and an AHRC-funded MSt in Composition from Oxford University, and is currently studying for an LAHP-funded composition PhD at King’s College London, looking into issues of immediacy in the perception and cognition of contemporary classical music. He is also interested in tropes of irony and seriousness in music, and how the distinction between the two can be destabilised to darkly comic effect.
SEAN MORRIS | CONDUCTOR Sean is an emerging conductor who is currently reading Music at King's College London, having previously studied at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Having founded the KCL Modern Music Society in his first year, as Musical Director he has led the society Sinfonia in works including Berio's Folk Songs, Janáček's Concertino, and Schoenberg's Kammersymphonie no.1 and Verklärte Nacht. Prior to Collision, Sean collaborated with Guildhall professor of composition Matthew King in a production of his 1992 opera, The Snow Queen.
HOLLY MUIR | DESIGNER Holly is a designer and artist who uses historical and fictional narratives as a basis for installations. She recently graduated with from Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Art, after which her work was exhibited in the Woon Foundation Prize for talented graduating artists. She has worked in the prop and scenic departments of Scottish Opera, the Royal Opera House, the RSC and Pinewood Creative. In addition to designing The Yellow Sound and Liturgie, Holly’s previous stage design credits include Berenice (The Space), Semi-Monde (Oxford Playhouse) and Our Country’s Good (O’Reilly Theatre, Oxford).
JESSIE ANAND | PRODUCER Jessie works in the Development Department of the National Theatre and as a freelance producer. Recent productions include Found and Lost, an opera installation by Emily Hall at the Corinthia Hotel London, and the UK tour and Southwark Playhouse run of Licensed To Ill, a new piece of gig-theatre about the Beastie Boys. Jessie studied Modern History at the University of Cambridge and subsequently King’s College London, specialising in nineteenth- and twentieth- century cultural history. Cast
Masterly: Juliet Wallace Alma / Paperboy / Saleslady: Olivia Sjöberg Taa: Bethany Horak-Hallett Paulsen: Sharang Sharma Virmula / The Voice / The Jailbird: Barnaby Beer Rommel / Schmitt: Henry George Page
Crowd / Congregation / Police: Miles Ashdown Claudia Chapman Kathleen Greene Fabian Helmrich Nicholas Hennell-Foley Freya Morgan Alessia Naccarato Tom Rushton Beatrix Swanson Scott
COLLISION PREMIERES
GREENWOOD THEATRE 55 WESTON STREET LONDON SE1 3RA
8PM, 24 & 25 MAY 2017