Faust [working title]

5 things to know about FAUST [working title]

1° Work in progress

On a Sunday in late May 2020, while most artists around the world were in lockdown, director Lisenka Heijboer Castañón’s phone rang. It was Sophie de Lint, director of Dutch National Opera proposing Heijboer Castañón to open the opera house’s new season with an alternative production.

Given free rein to put her artistic team of young Netherlands-based theatre-makers together, Heijboer Castañón immediately knew that she wanted conductor, composer and theatre-maker Manoj Kamps on board. ‘I have a list of people I would very much like to work with. Manoj was at the top of that list.’ As the team grew and the project became increasingly collaborative, it became clear to Heijboer Castañón that they had to attempt something ‘completely different from what is normal for this opera house, because that was simply impossible’.

2° Literary inspiration

In regards to content, the only assignment for the young team was to weave in Goethe’s Faust, the figure that runs like a thread through Dutch National Opera's current programme. The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragic play about the scholar Faust, who makes a pact with the Devil to exchange his soul for unlimited knowledge and pleasures, has inspired generations of artists from different disciplines, amongst them operas by Arrigo Boito, Charles Gounod and Hector Berlioz.

Heijboer Castañón and her team were less interested in engaging artistically with Faust’s deal with Devil. They were more drawn to his hunger for knowledge. ‘That did excite us: because what is knowledge? We also wondered about who decides what knowledge is worth acquiring and who are our teachers? We live in a world where we are again confronted with the fact that we cannot ‘know’ everything so we felt like we might want to open up the concept of what knowledge meant in Faust. Maybe knowledge is empathy, the sharing of stories and art.

It led them to explore different ways of gaining knowledge and they decided to have the combined knowledge of team and cast, inform the content of the performance.

3° Postcolonial voices

When Manoj Kamps joined the team, they brought along a new frame of reference. ‘For me, it is very natural to look at the world from a post-colonial perspective. I am quite literally a product of it, as a Sri Lankan-born child of Dutch adoptive parents, growing up in a British system. I carry all these colonial layers within me, and I have become more aware of this over the years - what that means, both for me and for society.’

4° A polyphonic feast

It was only natural that this multilayered approach should be reflected in each facette of the production. Musically, this meant that not everything sounds exactly as it was originally composed, sometimes centuries ago. As Kamps explains, starting from the idea of abundance, they wanted to allow alternative histories and possible futures to coexist, leading to the addition of new voices. Seeing that the music had to be rearranged so as to abide by safety measures in the orchestra pit, they made a virtue out of necessity.

Together with Heijboer Castañón, they invited no less than twelve different composers from all over the world to work on the project with them. Some were asked to stay close to the original, others to pull a work apart completely.

5° A breath of fresh air

From their individual performances to their singing by way of striking ensemble pieces such as when they are slipping down a huge slide to the music of Bruno Coulais' lullaby Cerf-volant, children play a central role in Heijboer Castañón’s stage concept. Exempt from the obligation of keeping a distance and wearing a mask, they alone are allowed to move freely on stage. 

As their voice too, is added to the polyphony of voices represented, this production only gains in its open-ended and refreshing effect. As Bachtrack’s Michael Klier attests ‘Faust [working title] is an important contribution to the renewal of the genre of musical theatre: away from the museum right into the middle of social actuality.’