Red Rooms or seven episodes about a precarious relationship: Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf inspired by Louise Bourgeois’ installation Red Room (Child) and Red Room (Parents).
A music theater about truth and lies, about lust and abuse, about love and power for voices, chamber ensemble, recorder trio, Revox tape machine, radios, cassette players and electronics in seven acts (2021-2022 premiere).
Color is stronger than language. It’s a subliminal communication.
Red is an affirmation at any cost — regardless of the dangers in fighting — of contradictions, of
aggressions. It symbolizes the intensity of the emotions involved.
(Louise Bourgeois)
On the stage are three cages and a family trapped in their own patterns — mother, son and granddaughter. They listen to the radio, talk, sing, drink, eat, sleep, kiss, fuck, puke, shit… The radio broadcasts interviews, news and commercials from Radio Roja, recognizable in German, English, French, Spanish. On stage on the other hand, a wild mixture of artificial language, onomatopoeia, noises, quotations from literature and diaries is produced with voices and other sound generators. The music speaks the language of Angélica Castelló: Dreamlike slowness and anti-virtuosity, minimalism and offbeat friction, the fearless misappropriation of early music (Gibbons, Ockeghem, Monteverdi), pop music and other objets trouvés. Quiet passages meet walls of noise, rock, drones, sine waves and low frequencies. And while the radio keeps playing, the Revox tape machine forms the gut through which everything passes, the intestines in which all incoming raw materials are devoured and transformed. (Speaking of food: Somewhere in the forest, deep in the subconscious of the Red Rooms, live the grandmother, Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, in various incarnations.) The 15 musicians and soloists on stage, the dense network of electronics and field recordings conjure up external landscapes as well as intimate atmospheres of the rooms, making the emotional states of those present audible as well as the hopeless interpenetration and mixing of role models. The inner and outer spaces – whereby “inside” does not only stand for the psyche and “outside” not only for society or culture – open up existential experiences in different degrees of abstraction. In seven episodes, behavioral patterns of a familial, moral or erotic nature come to the surface. The stage is both a crime scene and a temple, a place of memories and events. The audience becomes the listening voyeur of a claustrophobic, immersive world full of innocence, danger, life, death, sex and eros.