Encounters with the foreign - sensual experience in contemporary music theatre

Abstract

Contemporary composers such as Mauricio Kagel, Luigi Nono or Manos Tsangaris have broken with traditional listening expectations, questioned spatial settings (such as the division into stage and auditorium) or experimented with the theatrical effect of sounds. For the past thirty years, such confrontations with music-theatrical narratives have also been reflected in contemporary music theatre for young audiences. After children‘s and young people‘s music theatre has arrived either as a separate category (for example Kinderoper Köln, Junge Oper Stuttgart), as an integrated category (Komische Oper Berlin, Mainz, Freiburg) or also in freer production contexts, a continuous discourse has developed about the aims, aesthetics, structures and production methods, which repeatedly challenges both theatremakers and composers, librettists and musicians to critical reflection. Music theatre for young audiences proves to be more than just an experimental field for music-dramatic narrative forms, which on the one hand are close to ‚instrumental theatre‘, on the other hand reveal a confrontation with other musical styles (jazz or pop music) and with the noisiness of music or approaches to performative (music) theatre. Using selected examples, this article presents the narrative strategies in contemporary music theatre for young audiences and deepens the question of how the intermedial interplay of language, song, sound, space, and light focuses on the performative sensory experience of young audiences in order to smooth the way for young audiences to encounter an art form that, in its thematic, genre-specific, aesthetic, and ritualized form, is not easily accessible to young audiences without theatre experience.