- 08.12.2019, 4–10 p.m.Admission free, Open Day
Over the course of the ten day program, the WAGNER CREW will decide for themselves what happens on the last day. The master students can now organize further workshops, start new collectives and write songs together, shoot new music videos in the Saal, prepare a new festival or go outside and carry their practices into society and into the city. The underlying questions of the project are posed once more from another perspective: what is art nowadays? And how do we want to live and learn together?
Cast & Credits
„WAGNER PROJECT – Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg“ ist eine Produktion von Künstlerhaus Mousonturm und Port B. Gefördert durch die Kulturstiftung des Bundes, die Japan Foundation und die Stiftung Polytechnische Gesellschaft. Präsentiert von FRIZZ.
Biography
Akira Takayama
Akira Takayama (born 1969) founded Port B in 2002. He develops projects together with this collective that break the existing theatrical framework and interact collaboratively with other media. His work aspires to a contemporary form of the so-called “architecture of the theatre” in which he extends the practice of the theatre and the audience into society and the urban space. Takayama’s audience-focussed works are an attempt to experience a theatre that transcends the physical theatre space to establish itself as a new platform with an altered function in society. In recent years he has developed works in diverse genres including tourism, urban planning, art, literature, fashion and mass media. In these, he uses theatrical ideas to open up new potential across a broad spectrum of media and disciplines.
Akira Takayama created his first theatrical works as a stage director – these included the Japanese premieres of several pieces by Elfriede Jelinek. The projects that he develops in collaboration with the collective PortB are usually devised in close collaboration with prestigious cultural institutions around the world, such as the recent large-scale participatory project ‘Our Songs’ for the Biennale of Sydney in 2018 and the ongoing research project ‘Heterotopia’ for the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens and the Sharjah Biennial in Beirut.
In 2014 Akira Takayama / Port B developed the project ‘EVACUATE FRANKFURT’ together with the Mousonturm, in which 30 S- and U-Bahn stations across the entire Rhine-Main region became starting points for individual evacuation tours of a range of social communities and theatrical ready-mades. www.evakuieren.de
In 2017 Takayama, once again working in close co-operation with the Mousonturm to develop and produce a work over a long period, was able to realise his vision of a ‘McDonald’s Radio University’: people who had come to Germany as refugees shortly beforehand acted as “professors”, presenting a comprehensive programme of lectures lasting several weeks based on their highly diverse educational backgrounds, working and life experiences. www.mru.global
Then in 2019 in the ‘WAGNER PROJECT – Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’ Takayama brought one of Richard Wagner’s most famous operas to the Mousonturm stage: ‘Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’. Based on the fictional narrative of Wagner’s opera and its historical references – a competition between singers during the time of the Reformation – Takayama founded a School of Hip-Hop.
Akira Takayama has been Associate Artist at the Mousonturm since 2014.