The Münchner Biennale, a theater festival, explores the motif of time.
The new millennium approaches. Celebratory events are already piling up like pages torn from old calendars. Newspapers count down the seconds remaining until our future begins. Is that the measure of where we’ve been and where we are going? Can time be gauged otherwise? “How time flies…” is the motto of the 6th Münchner Biennale, Internationales Festival für neues Musiktheater, one of Europe’s most ambitious performing-arts festivals. Not to be confused with Broadway-style entertainment, the pieces presented in this forum are serious explorations of the leading edge of contemporary musical theater. The three new productions, all revolving around the time motif, can be seen as a loose trilogy. Babette Koblenz of Germany opens the festival with her Recherche (Research), a journey through time, expressed in the language of past and future myth. In De Amore the outcome of the research of the first piece is taken up by Spanish composer Mauricio Sotelo, whose work depicts time as a spiral. Finally, three separate phases of time will be explored in Wenn die Zeit über die Ufer tritt (When time floods its banks) by Ukrainian Vladimir Tarnopolski. Several concerts, a performance by an experimental music-theater workshop and symposia round out the offerings. The Münchner Biennale has become a landmark of the new-music landscape. Its aim, to present and support young composers of this genre, garners copious praise each year and attracts a swelling number of fans. The admittedly weighty topics are more than substantiated by finely staged productions and intriguing performances. 6th Münchner Biennale April 16-30. Recherche: 16, 18, 20 April; De Amore: 19, 21, 22 April; Wenn die Zeit über die Ufer tritt: 25, 28, 29 April.