Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is no stranger to staging French opera at the Bayerische Staatsoper (Rameau's Les Indes galantes and Gluck's Alceste). With dancers from his Eastman company, he’s now working on Toshio Hosokawa's opera Hanjo for the Ja, Mai festival, where he focuses on a cultural world in which he has already immersed himself in earlier works. In TeZuka, for example, he got to grips with Osamu TeZuka’s Japanese mangas. At any rate he is driven by an intercultural interest, as with the Chinese Shaolin in his acclaimed piece, Sutra, or the communication between cultures in Babel (words). With Hanjo, Cherkaoui collaborates with Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose works move between visual and action art, examine cultural and political action, or – as with his culinary performances – create a place of gathering themselves. Hanjo is conducted by Lothar Koenigs, who has already taken to the Bayerisches Staatsorchester’s podium in Munich, with both the Strauss repertoire and 20th century operas such as Wozzeck and Khovanshchina. For Hanjo, the Bayerische Staatsoper collaborates with Munich’s Haus der Kunst, where the production will also be performed.

Which is truer? Present or past, reality or dream sphere? In the world of Japanese Nō theatre, which was the inspiration for Hanjo, times coexist, perception opens up to the limits of the impossible. It sends us in search of a deeper insight into what we call reality. A look into the catacombs on which our certainties are built. At the centre of the plot is Hanako, "a mad girl" whose life has consisted of waiting since she and her lover Yoshio went their separate ways. He promised to return with a fan to recognise him by. Since then she has been standing at the station every day. Hanako, in the meantime, has started a relationship with Jitsuko, an older artist who guards and possesses the younger one like a treasure. One day Yoshio returns and demands Hanako. But she does not want to recognize him. Does she love the man of her memory more than him? Or has expectation itself become the purpose of her life? In the dual modern rewriting of the old Japanese material by author Yukio Mishima (1955) and composer Toshio Hosokawa (2004), Hanjo has become a chamber play that puts a love triangle under the microscope, strand by strand, and weighs the power relationships and the love relationships within it against each other. The new production by choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is being created in collaboration with Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija as an interplay of opera, dance and visual arts, in a new venue – Munich’s Haus der Kunst.