Matsukaze

Lotte van den Berg’s productions move between dance, theatre and film and work with both professional and amateur actors. In 2014, she founded Third Space, a small and highly flexible organization based in Amsterdam, where she currently realizes her work. Together with visual artist Daan't Sas she initiated the long-term project, Building Conversation here, among others. Since its inception, Building Conversation has evolved into an international artist collective, which is fascinated by what happens when people begin to converse. Van den Berg is now collaborating with Alicja Kwade for the first time. The visual artist's work is inspired by philosophical, scientific and social issues. In her sculptures, she negotiates models and constructions for the perception of reality in order to question the possibilities of subjective and objective knowledge. Together, the two artists now get up close and personal with Toshio Hosokawa's work Matsukaze and the cosmos of opera.

The somnambulistic play, Matsukaze, an adaptation of a Japanese Nō play by the 15th-century master Zeami, tells of the unhappy love of two sisters, the salt-washers Matsukaze and Murasame, for the nobleman, Yukihira. When he has to leave one day, he promises them he will return when he hears desire call. But he dies. The two sisters remain prisoners of their longing, become ghosts, return again and again to the living. Only a monk can take them out of their condition. Hosokawa's composition transforms natural moods into tender, loving sounds, plays with silence, traces the passing of time and the non-passing of deep feelings, madness, the relationship between past, present and future, the very fundamental correlation between human existence and nature. The world premiere was celebrated at the Opéra La Monnaie in Brussels in 2011. Dutch director Lotte van den Berg and internationally renowned visual artist Alicja Kwade now collaborate for the first time in this production by the Bayerische Staatsoper.