JA, MAI
The festival for early and contemporary music theater
The second edition of the Ja, Mai Festival, newly founded by the Bayerische Staatsoper, focuses on synergies between music theater, dance and visual arts and revolves around the thematic complex of "expectation". The festival explores motifs such as waiting, the passing of time, the question of letting go or holding on, and the various semantic dimensions of time.
HANJO
The piece Hanjo by contemporary composer Toshio Hosokawa, inspired by No Theater, will be performed. In Hanjo, Rirkrit Tiravanija, a visual artist, is commissioned to design the stage space. Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, who has already been responsible for the productions of Les Indes galantes and Alceste at the Bayerische Staatsoper, will direct the new production.
IL RITORNO/THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
The second production of the festival deals with one of the earliest operas ever: Claudio Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria. The work will be performed as Il ritorno/The Year of Magical Thinking, using a play by U.S. writer Joan Didion, who died in 2021, based on her memoirs. Responsible for the scenic realization of Il ritorno/The Year of Magical Thinking is the multiple award-winning acting director Christopher Rüping, who will direct an opera for the first time at the festival.
FESTIVAL PROGRAM
In the run-up to Ja, Mai and during the festival period, the narratives and thematic complexes will be artistically fanned out in a festival program - themed concerts, cinema series, Stelldichein!, introductions and post-festival discussions - at various locations in Munich.
Waiting can be associated with memory and forgetting, with not being able to let go in love, with nostalgia and madness.
