March 26th, 2025 Concertgebouw Brugge, Bruges
March 29th – 30th, 2025 Kaaitheater, Brussels
May 21st – 22nd, 2025 Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg
September 17th, 2025 Musiktheatertage, Vienna
90 minutes
An Experimental Opera
In The Rise, composer Eva Reiter and choreographer Michiel Vandevelde focus on the coexistence and interchanges of various worlds as they unfold on stage successively. Thereby it is the process of translation that lead to the emergence of such new worlds. Throughout translating and re-contextualizing symbols, signs, gestures and sounds, new languages are created that eventually transform our perspective on a particular world.
The Rise is based on the poetry of Nobel prize winner Louise Glück. Specifically her publication Averno serves as the main material for the libretto. Averno, a crater lake in Italy, was believed to be the entrance gate to the underworld. In her poetry Glück connects and interchanges the two worlds of the living and the dead, returning from one to another and evokes images of life and death, of eternity and the profane. Similarly to the surface of the lake which serves as a permeable membrane into that parallel world, we will create parallel and intermediate worlds throughout the way these poems are performed.
