Mittwoch

Dear Audience,

 

This year, particularly many audience members and participants have expressed their excitement about the festival. We can look forward to a diverse programme featuring 40 international artists from the fields of composition, poetry, performance, visual arts, comics, and video animation, all contributing from a variety of perspectives, alongside wonderful performers on the stages of the Theaterhaus.

 

But behind this excitement lies something more: the expectation of a festival event as a moment of affirmation, as a »feeling of home« in a broader sense, as an aesthetic space where we can experience great emotions but also engage in controversies–all at a level defined by humanism, tolerance, calm, and attentiveness. In a heterogeneous community that is secure and aware of itself. And of course, we are doing everything to ensure that ECLAT 2025 fulfills this promise.

 

But is that enough? Is the offer of differentiated perception an offer for society as a whole (and do we have to offer something to society at large)? Can we, as artists, especially as organisers of contemporary music events, contribute to cohesion in our polarising world? How do we respond to global challenges that no longer seem manageable?

 

Art certainly does not arise in isolation from these contexts and questions. Some answer them with the complexity of musical expression, which is determined solely by the immanent laws of music. Others are driven to address issues in sound, image, and language, drawing attention and taking a stand. There are very different »red threads« that have emerged between the projects of this year’s edition.

 

The festival begins with the artistic response to a board game, The Game of Life, in which the goal is »to completely ruin all other players and end up as the sole winner with a pile of riches… I was so horrified that I thought I must consider it as material so that it doesn’t always irritate me so much.« Uwe Rasch’s DSDL is part of his trilogy Mit Ach und Krach, which runs throughout the entire festival.

 

Alex Paxton wants to make magical music: singing as play, listening as touch, and harmony as life within a body. He describes his art–a selection of his images is also featured in this booklet–as a »new maximalism«, fuelled by our maximalist world, the internet, social media, and the fast-paced nature of everything. »My subconscious, the magical unknown that writes art, has been fed by all these things.«

 

Thus, the overflowing, highly virtuosic, almost impossible-to-perform manically magical celebration of sensuality becomes an almost breathless dance on a volcano.

 

At the end of the evening, once again, the game. Christian Winther Christensen sketches fragility and poetry with a sound-image of a child absorbed in play with building blocks. »I just want to build something when so much is being destroyed out in the world,« he says in an interview with Michael Zwenzner, whose conversations with festival participants enrich our PORTAL on the website.

 

Ahead of us lie five rich festival days. I would like to thank our fantastic team, who have carefully and effectively supported the complex productions and ensured the smooth running of the festival. All staff members in the organisation and technical departments are listed on the page eclat.org

A heartfelt thanks also goes to the Theaterhaus team for their collegial cooperation.

 

Now, I wish us all an inspiring and joyful ECLAT 2025!

 

Christine Fischer, Artistic Director