Ferdinand Schmatz
BABEL,N

The kunsthaus muerz presents the worldwide first performance of Ferdinand Schmatz’s apocalyptic bible transcription, adapted as a Schrammel opera by Walther Soyka, an artist in the Viennese Schrammel music style. Ferdinand Schmatz’s book „das grosse babel,n“ is a rewriting which follows selected parts of the bible (the book Genesis, the psalms and the apocalypse). Schmatz develops the figures of speech and thought and their motives and themes suggested and anchored in the original texts, and brings them to consciousness in the form of a great recitative. The sounds and subjects of various bible translations resonate like phantoms in the acoustic and cognitive background as Schmatz, in a post-babylonic plurality of languages, leads his poem toward the sensory and theoretic origins of the connection between thought and language.

Regie: Lucas Cejpek
Bühnenbild, Ausstattung, Raumgestaltung: arnold schönberg kunstschule
Schauspielerin / Schauspieler: Brigitta Furgler
Autorin / Autor, Text: Ferdinand Schmatz
Musikerin / Musiker: Walther Soyka