21 downbeat: »WOZZECK – eine Pop-Oper nach Alban Berg«

For his opera »Wozzeck«, Alban Berg was inspired by Georg Büchner’s drama on the everyday life of a soldier: As Woyzeck’s pay is not enough to support his lover Marie and their illegitimate child, he serves his abusive captain and allows an unscrupulous doctor to experiment on him. When he learns of Marie’s secret affair, his world starts to fall apart.

Hardship, fear, and humiliation lead to a state of emergency. Woyzeck acquires a knife and takes Marie to a lake. The voices in Woyzeck’s head intensify to the point of noise, cursing, hounding, and harassing him.
In their new pop opera, RambaZamba Theater house band 20 downbeat rework Alban Berg’s orchestral scraps, melodic fragments, and libretto snippets with electronic sounds and thrust the titular character, played by puppeteer Hannah Elischer, across the stage into the open knife of his personal catastrophe.

21 downbeat is made up of composer and musician Leo Solter and, in varying line-ups, the RambaZamba actors Eva Fuchs, Hieu Pham, Moritz Höhne, Heiko Fechner, Ferdinand Dambeck, Vincent Köhler, and Sebastian Urbanski. The principles of the inclusive band: exhilaration, ecstasy, noise and confetti! The band members create a unique sound using texts and poems of their own as well as by other contemporary authors, beyond the bounds of convention.

Credits: Leo Solter (music), Hieu Pham (music), Moritz Höhne (music), Eva Fuchs (music), Hannah Elischer (puppeteer), Jacob Höhne (art director), Marco Casiglieri (video), Vicki Steinmüller (assistance), Stephan Lux (technical director), Beatrix Brandler (costume), Dorothee Kutz (costume), Anton Seidlitz (technical department), Robert Philipp (light), Mikhail Barabanov (sound), Jan Czeschner (technical department), Nora Linnemann (publicity), Philip Zwanzig (publicity).