Wiener Festwochen: Einstein On The Beach

Theatre innovator Susanne Kennedy and visual artist Markus Selg are staging an opera for the very first time. Together they create a futuristic work that blends installation, ritual and theatre. With their distinctive theatrical language, they break down boundaries between humans and machines, reality and simulation, between theatre, the visual arts and virtual worlds. On a continuously rotating stage a new kind of community cultivates an unusual language of movement. It seems to live according to its own, enigmatic rules. Inspired by that unconventional genius Albert Einstein, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson created Einstein on the Beach, a 20th century masterpiece that breaks with all the conventions of opera and refuses to follow a linear narrative structure. Repetitive patterns convey the experience of time as a sensory phenomenon. This entirely reworked version evokes an immersive sense of the present in which the future and the past converge. From trance to utopia: vibrant music theatre as a boundary experience.