2023-07-18 16:50:35
Jay Scheib is writing a bit of Bayreuth Festival history this year. His “Parsifal” interpretation comes virtually on stage. A novelty on the Green Hill.
Bayreuth.
Bayreuth director Jay Scheib believes that anyone who wants to try something new in the opera needs good nerves. “I’ve worked in the theatre, in the opera and with rock bands and have done many different things,” he says in an interview with the German Press Agency. “And the truth is, if you want to do something that’s never been done before, you have to have staying power, handle setbacks and stay true to yourself – no matter what the noise around.”
The 53-year-old is writing a bit of festival history this year because he is bringing the virtual world to the Green Hill. Scheib, Professor of Music and Theater Arts at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), tells the story of Richard Wagner’s opera about the Knights of the Grail in an augmented reality version. The events on the stage are supplemented by virtual elements thanks to the appropriate glasses.
“AR is still little used in German theaters – in contrast to VR,” says the editor-in-chief of the theater magazine “Die Deutsche Bühne”, Ulrike Kolter. “On the other hand, there are already a few VR projects. The Augsburg State Theater is an absolute pioneer. They started using glasses with virtual productions even before the pandemic and were of course able to benefit from this during the Corona period.”
According to them, the Staatstheater Nürnberg will also experiment with the connection of analogue and digital theater in the new XRT venue for the new season.
The Bayreuther “Parsifal” is now “one of the largest of the AR projects on German stages that I know of, and of course it has an immense signal effect when Bayreuth does something like that,” says Kolter. “In Bayreuth, the possibilities for experiments are limited. You can’t change anything about the music, the selection of works is limited, so the stage elements offer themselves as a playground. And of course the whole thing fits in with the direction that Katharina Wagner has been taking for a few years , in order to make the house fit for the future and also to open up a younger audience.”
But the path wasn’t that easy, if you listen to Scheib: “When you do something new, you have to keep your nerve. There will always be someone who says it’s technically or financially impossible. But the risk is part of it theater about it,” he says.
However, the financial risk was probably too great for the commercial management of the festival – and that’s why only a small part of the almost 2000 spectators in the Festspielhaus will be able to see the virtual part of the new production of Wagner’s “Bühnenweihfestspiel”. Only 330 such glasses were purchased. The tickets with AR glasses are more expensive.
“AR is there to let us catch a glimpse of a world in which there can still be visions and where things still exist that we no longer pay attention to,” says Scheib. “We’re going to explode the walls, we’re going to make them disappear and expand the scenic design almost to infinity. Things are going to fly through the air.”
But the approximately 1,700 people without AR glasses also get to see something, as Scheib promises: “Even without the glasses, the production is a full one – with a complete design, complete costumes.” The staging is then “different, calmer”. (dpa)
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