DAVID MARTON. Narcisse et Echo. a road opera : freely inspired by Ovide. Creation June 2019

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1 THÉÂTRE VIDY-LAUSANNE AV. E.-H. JAQUES-DALCROZE 5 CH-1007 LAUSANNE Direction production and touring Caroline Barneaud Mail : c.barneaud@vidy.ch DAVID MARTON a road opera : Narcisse et Echo freely inspired by Ovide Creation June 2019 Portrait of David Marton Blandine Soulage-Rocca

2 DISTRIBUTION Creation at Vidy 2 Conception and directing : David Marton Dramaturgy : Lucien Strauch Barbara Engelhardt Composition/sound : Daniel Dorsch With : 5 performers, including Paul Brody (composition, trumpet) Michael Wilhelmi (composition, piano) Production : Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne Coproduction : Wiener Festwochen - Maillon, Théâtre de Strasbourg-scène européenne - Nouveau Théâtre de Montreuil - (en cours) Creation June 2019

3 3 THE ROAD OPERA AS A METAMORPHOSIS Initially trained as a pianist at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin before becoming a musician for the likes of Frank Castorf, Árpád Schilling and Christoph Marthaler, over the last 15 years David Marton has become a leading figure in musical theatre, continuing to surprise with his formal inventiveness and ability to bring drama to the musical repertoire. He has been invited to collaborate with major German and European theatres and is sought after by European opera houses for his productions that through their mise en scène, both learned and ingenious, shake up the notions of traditional opera yet reveal the very letter, spirit and tone of the works. This was evident in Don Giovanni Keine Pause (2012), where Giovanni is a woman, the text is interspersed with quotes from the Marquis de Sade, and Mozart mixes with the jazz world. In just a few years, Marton has become one of Europe s most unique and inspiring artists. While for the last 15 years he has been exploring the possible relationships between the various repertoires and their forms, both in opera and theatre, he is now searching for a hybrid that would lead to a lighter and more mobile form of opera a road opera. This musical theatre, freed from the constraints of opera, has a pared-down crew and less substantial scenography, but retains the same principles of composition, mixing music, voice, text, scenography and movement. This search has led to Narcisse et Echo, a new creation that invites us to reflect on metamorphosis, inspired by Ovid. Read David Marton s portrait on the Goethe Institute website - 50 contemporary German directors : David Marton NARCISSUS AND ECHO OR LOVE THRU IMAGE AND SOUND Recounted in Metamorphoses by Roman author Ovid, the myths of Echo and Narcissus are linked together. Echo is a nymph who has been cursed and is condemned to repeat only the last words spoken to her. She falls in love with Narcissus, but is unable to attract him as she cannot use her own words, instead reduced to expressing herself via the sounds of others. Narcissus wearies of the nymph s tiresome voice and discovers his own reflection in mirror-like calm waters. Fascinated, he falls in love with it. Through this image, he is drawn into a spiral of infinite self-reflection from which he is unable to escape. These two tales touch on the themes of art and love as much as they do on loneliness and the relationship with oneself. The dramatic aspect of this creation is metamorphosis the search for a form and narrative that are continually changing, where each element transforms another, driven by five performers, singers, actors and musicians. And finally, the music will range from baroque to contemporary. It will be performed on-stage, both with period instruments and with sounds from today s digital technology, emanating from smartphones and other objects of daily use. The movement between analogue and digital worlds will signal a journey through time, where snippets of the past are revealed, as if they were a possible future. In David Marton s theatre, music is like a memory of the future: the insubstantial and intangible shape of human desires and hopes such as Echo s voice and the image of Narcissus re-emerge from a forgotten past in an unexpected and unpredictable way. This time, it tells of a long-hoped for and endless search for love, as well as the wandering path of loneliness. ERIC VAUTRIN DRAMATURG AT THE THÉÂTRE VIDY-LAUSANNE

4 4 A STORY OF IMPOSSIBLE LOVE Narcissus and Echo isn t a production about selfies and narcissism but is first and foremost a love story. Echo loves Narcissus, but she has been cursed and is condemned to repeat only the last words spoken to her. Narcissus has also been punished: he is only able to love himself, and this love will never be enough. Neither of them can communicate with the other. There is no possible meeting point for them; the idea of we is impossible. Ultimately they remain alone, unable to connect and in corresponding isolation. We wish to portray the profound loneliness of the self. The social phenomenon of narcissism, as well as of the echo, are extreme forms of this loneliness. Although modern technological advances provide us with more and more opportunities for exchange, as well as enabling increased self-study, this loneliness is ever-present. Today we are just as alone as we were before the digital revolution. DAVID MARTON JUNE 2018

5 5 DAVID MARTON, OR MUSICAL THEATRICALITY Trained as a pianist, conductor and director, David Marton s way of not simply illustrating the score, but of searching for the theatricality in the music itself and for the musicality in human behaviour, is surprising. His theatre contains the dual traces of gentle melancholy and a surrealist humour that recalls the sharp mind of Marcel Duchamp. He makes use of a playful science that gives a sense of staging and drama to the music. And so in his work, especially thanks to performers who are musicians as much as they are actors or singers, music equals text, capable of expressing a character s innermost feelings or the hidden shape of a situation, or even the unforeseen turbulence of a narrative, while words and gestures can reveal unexpected melodic and rhythmic qualities. Music is not just a means for rendering emotion in the middle of a story, but a way of understanding the world, he says. Where staged sequences of events or the relationships between individuals organised by precise psychological rules would normally occur, music instead allows its own unique rules to appear. I believe that this is a vital step in the endless inquiry into how we should create musical theatre. And so Marton s primary focus is the fundamental musicality of human beings, whose individuality and innermost feelings are expressed through sound. On stage, music and singing are tangible realities in the exploration of aspects of the human condition. And, hopes David Marton, music will thus become an integral part of our existence. ERIC VAUTRIN DRAMATURG AT THE THÉÂTRE VIDY-LAUSANNE

6 6 PRESS EXTRACTS «A Phenomenon Called David Marton» Marie-Aude Roux, Le Monde, On 27 November 1975, the artist was born into a well-respected artistic and intellectual family, in Budapest his father was a painter and his mother a translator. But it was thanks to socialism, which required all children to learn a musical instrument at school, that he set out on the path of being a professional pianist, studying at the prestigious Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, before being swept away by German pianist Klaus Hellwig, one of Wilhelm Kempff s former students, met during a summer class and professor at the Berlin University of the Arts. Exit Budapest. Guten Tag Berlin! Marton found the piano to be too lonely and started to form a band; he studied orchestra conducting and musical theatre directing at the Hanns Eisler Berlin Academy of Music (from 1999 to 2004) and met master directors at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz Swiss Christoph Marthaler (with whom he collaborated as a pianist and actor), Frank Castorf and Árpád Schilling (as musical arranger for both). He now has his own core of people working with him: pianist Jan Czajkowski, who plays and produces his musical arrangements, and scenographer Alissa Kolbusch, who designs his catch-all, geometric, walled-off, interior universes. They all deserve to be mentioned one by one, as their outstanding work stems from performance. Marton has gone from success to success and in 2009 was named Opera Director of the Year by magazine Die Deutsche Bühne for Don Giovanni. Keine Pause and Lulu. «One of Today s Most Exciting Directors» Exitmag, oct Decidedly, David Marton is a special case. Of Hungarian descent and living in Berlin, he swears by stage work and research work. (...) He works until late on stage with singers, searching for that final rapport between theatre and music, and is one of those rare, truly inventive directors that dares to make the shifts and movements that others don t, such as the choir s slowed-down choreographies in his previous production Orpheus and Eurydice. He came to prominence at the Nuits de Fourvière festival with his rock n roll pocket opera Don Giovanni. Keine Pause, a compressed version of Mozart s Don Juan played by a woman and performed with the keyboards and electric guitars of today. That required courage. A child of Christoph Marthaler s radical and theoretical theatre (and of his humour too), (...) faithful servant to a music he loves for its liberty, David Marton, too, is just searching for one thing: new forms that make the experience of listening to live music a unique one. We re looking forward to seeing the next work of one of today s most exciting directors. «Horns Sound in the Forest» Egbert Tholl, Süddeutsche Zeitung, David Marton has succeeded in creating a magical production of Bellini s La Sonnambula for the Münchner Kammerspiele. (...) Even though he is simply continuing what he began ten years ago. Of Hungarian descent, former musician for Castorf and Marthaler, and trained pianist, conductor and director, apparently Marton can t decide what he would rather do, opera or theatre. So he has decided on his own exceptional path: he does both at the same time. The stronger the subject matter, the more beautiful and profound the result. (...) Two aspects are particularly phenomenal: firstly, the way in which Marton combines characters and their dreams in Arndt Rössler s lights, the way in which he makes each relationship and each action plausible in its melancholy and nostalgia, even as the boundaries between interpreter and interpretation become diaphanous. And secondly, the music. «We Call Him Opera» Sabine Leucht, Nachtkritik, By playing with associations, Marton manages to open up small interstices in La Sonnambula s continuous melodies and breathe air into them. The purely instrumental music, gently murmured and whispered, as sweetly as opera, or screamed passionately, is one form of communication, among others, that each of us can take hold of, according to our ability. (...) A theatre that is at once gentle, rough and intelligent.

7 7 DAVID MARTON Conception and directing After studying piano in Budapest, Hungarian David Marton joined the Hanns Eisler Berlin Academy of Music where he learnt from directors Christoph Marthaler, Frank Castorf and Árpád Schilling with whom he soon collaborated as a musical interpreter and arranger. His early productions demonstrated his keen sense of dramaturgy and stage music. He has become attracted to the relationship between them, where one never dominates the other: how can theatre and music create a dialogue, oppose one another, complete one another? How can music be translated into theatre? By searching for the rhythm and melodious harmony within theatre and the drama within music, by revisiting major canonical works in a manner as free as it is virtuosic and learned, he reveals the musicality of beings and the imaginary possibilities of music. The performances as well as the operatic productions of this artist, barely forty, are today produced and acclaimed by Europe s greatest theatres and opera houses, in particular, the Sophiensaele in Berlin, the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, the Münchner Kammerspiele and the MC93 in Paris. Portrait of David Marton Blandine Soulage-Rocca Samuel Rubio

8 8 CONTACTS DIRECTION : VINCENT BAUDRILLER DIRECTION PRODUCTION AND TOURING : CAROLINE BARNEAUD C.BARNEAUD@VIDY.CH +41 (0) TECHNICAL DIRECTION : CHRISTIAN WILMART / SAMUEL MARCHINA DT@VIDY.CH +41 (0) / 81