NOISE

Imagine fluorescent tube lighting. Imagine a PowerPoint presentation. Imagine a young professional mom. Imagine a semi-intellectual seminar about recovering from postnatal depression. Imagine an analogue synthesizer on wheels. Imagine a musical song about your baby falling off the couch. Imagine the world collapsing. Imagine far too much language. Imagine far too much feeling. Imagine far too little hope. Imagine hope.

What begins as a hallucinatory seminar on overcoming an existential crisis ends in a cathartic immersion in noise.

In this immersive performance opera, born from the urgency to learn how to navigate a world in collapse, Club Gewalt asks itself the question: how can you retune your senses amid the constant noise of information predicting the apocalypse? How do we give meaning to a future that is not overflowing with prosperity?

We live in a time of polycrisis. We are confronted with advancing fascism, the arrival of the climate crisis, Western complicity in genocide, fruit and vegetables full of PFAS, and our own identities that turn out to be permeated with (internalized) sexism, racism and homophobia. Where we were once promised a future of stability and progress, all the systems around us and within us now threaten to collapse.

The human survival instinct (LION! DANGER! FIGHT OR FLIGHT! SURVIVE! CELEBRATE!) falls short in the face of the complexity of today’s problems. Our amygdalae* become collectively overstimulated and we end up stranded in a panic limbo.

Can we learn to accept the collapse of systems as a law of the cosmos, without stopping our protest against injustice? Can we heal ourselves by not merely naming crises, but by truly feeling our way through them? Can we finally complete our stress cycles in this way, allowing us to better navigate a world on fire? Can we fall in love with being human again? And: is this the moment to search for God? Cuz: never waste a good crisis.

*The amygdala (plural: amygdalae, Greek: ἀμυγδαλή amygdalē = almond) is an almond-shaped cluster of neurons. This circuit plays a central role in the processing of aversive stimuli and the regulation of fear. Source: Wikipedia.

NOISE is an international music theatre performance by Club Gewalt, created at Neuköllner Oper Berlin and performed there until 7 May. The international premiere takes place on 16 April. The Dutch premiere will take place at the end of May during O. Festival for Opera. Music. Theatre. in Rotterdam. After that, the performance will also be shown at theatre festivals, followed by a theatre tour in the autumn.

Club Gewalt is a music-based performance collective from Rotterdam. Rooted in an aversion to injustice and a love of coming together, making, composing, producing and performing, they create their own work: from feminist punk Christmas musicals and introspective killjoy operas about institutional racism, to disruptive club nights in museums and political slut-pop concerts. Always virtuosic, musical, humorous and somewhat uncomfortable. Club Gewalt is addicted to audiences and, on the eve of the apocalypse, sings its lungs out in an attempt to unlock an alternative timeline. Because in the unknown lies the gateway to change.