- 19.11.2022, 4.00 pmfrom € 11 (tickets via Alte Oper)
According to official figures, the city of Frankfurt is home to people from 178 nations. And yet the number of languages and dialects spoken and sung in the city is even higher. For “Our Songs”, Japanese director Akira Takayama invites people from across the region to share songs, poems and stories from the past with the audience in their own languages. For one afternoon in this world premiere of the Frankfurt version, the Great Hall of the Alte Oper is transformed into a traditional Japanese Kabuki stage: a long, raised walkway leads the participants one by one across the auditorium to the stage, where they give voice to the city and sing, speak and recite for all those who cannot be here (anymore).
More informations on the projekt and the participants: oursongs.site
Duration: 4 hours (Entrance and exit are possible at any time)
Public Viewing on the B-Level of the Hauptwache
Cast & Credits
A production by Akira Takayama in co-production with Alte Oper Frankfurt and Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm. A project within the framework of Alliance of International Production Houses, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and supported by the Hessian Ministry of Science and Art as part of the intergenerational outreach initiative ALL IN – FÜR PUBLIKUM JEDEN ALTERS.
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.