Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm

The B-level of the Hauptwache Frankfurt is a magnificent stage. Framed by green-tiled columns and walls, illuminated by yellowish light, this place seems like a concentrate of the city’s polyphony. Here, every walk seems like a performance, every conversation (with oneself) like a small scene, and waiting people, vendors offering fruit and drinks or loitering young people become living tableaux.

Out of observations and recordings of this place, out of interviews with people who spend every day there, eight musicians from the ensemble MAM:manufaktur für aktuelle musik, together with pupils from IGS Süd and the composer and music theatre maker Hannes Seidl have developed a piece for the hall of the Mousonturm that celebrates polyphony. In a theatre landscape created by scenographer Natalia Orendain, a variety of perspectives produces a portrait of a city: how it could be, how it perhaps once was, how it sees itself. Enveloped in the background noise of footsteps, ventilation and underground trains, smaller and larger groups emerge as if randomly, making music together, playing ball, simply hanging out or telling stories. Occasional moments of the improbable and fantastic flash into the seemingly natural interplay to become part of the polyphonic polyphony.