Michel van der Aas Musiktheater an den Schnittstellen der Künste

The stage works of Dutch composer, film and theater director Michel van der Aa are characterized by an indissoluble coexistence of acoustic and visual components and use the latest technologies as tools for negotiating philosophical and social issues. They repeatedly focus on the nature of human identity and memory or on dealing with traumatic life experiences.

The contributions to this volume are dedicated to two central problem areas in interdisciplinary discourse: On the one hand, they explore the question of how contemporary art production can participate in current social discourses. For example, Van der Aa plays out the post-humanist vision of 'mind uploads' in multimedia settings and poses questions about ethical implications in the context of interpersonal interaction that is now only mediated by the media, while elsewhere he uses films and virtual reality to shift the boundaries of perception. On the other hand, the essays focus on the ways in which compositional and media tools are used to create spaces of experience in order to search for aesthetically communicable answers beyond scientific argumentation.

Questions about the genre affiliation of the music theatre works and about the distance to opera-historical traditions or the connection to them play just as much a role in this context as the cross-artistic and cross-disciplinary aspects of Van der Aa's work, its production-aesthetic aspects or questions of interpretative realization. The publication can therefore also be seen as a fundamental contribution to a theory of contemporary opera.

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