Out of Stage, a title that refers to works conceived for places and situations other than those offered by the traditional stage, outlines a broad perspective of contemporary musical theater and the role of new technologies, multimedia, with virtual reality and applied augmented reality programming. to the sound, according to new forms and genres. Alexander Schubert’s Sleep Laboratory is a 60-minute immersive and participatory performance, in which audience members lie in small personal compartments on field beds while wearing VR glasses, while the German composer and director transports them from the performing venue into different sound realities. which take the form of dreams and visions. Among the musical theater works commissioned by the Biennale Musica 2022, the return festival is particularly representative, the new project by Simon Steen-Andersen, a Danish composer living in Berlin, one of the most recognized voices of post-Kagelian research.

The dramaturgy of the work, based on The Return of Ulysses to the Homeland by Claudio Monteverdi, is linked to the recognition of the places where the Teatro di San Cassiano and the Teatro dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo stood, the first Venetian public theaters. In collaboration with the Estonian ensemble Vox Clamantis and the historic Cappella Marciana, Helena Tulve conceived Visions, in which the diffusion of different instrumental and vocal sound sources inside the Basilica transforms the acoustic space into a complex and pulsating instrument. The Dutch composer and director Michel van der Aa has imagined for the Biennale Musica 2022 The Book of Water, based on the theme of the erosion of the territory caused by rains and floods, from the novel by Max Frisch The Man in the Holocene, working on images, movements and sounds of different environments. The Sicilian composer Paolo Buonvino, known for his soundtracks, has designed a scenic concert based on the experience of a collective breath as sound and as a vital gesture. The project is inspired by the Sicilian and Mediterranean culture of çiatu (breath), and the relationship between the rhythm of human breathing and that of the waves surrounding the island. The Belgian composer Annelies Van Parys in Notwehr re-elaborates Adriano Banchieri’s collection of twenty five-voice madrigals Barca di Venetia for Padua, published in 1605 and revised for a second edition in 1623, a musical fresco of the society of the time that brings together different characters, ideal portraits of foreign musicians and various Italian regions on a boat trip along the canals. The trip, in this case, will take place in the form of a scenic concert in the Chapter Hall of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, painted by Tintoretto, including characters from the past and the present. OndÅ™ej Adámek, Prague composer, performer and director, and the young Japanese composer Rino Murakami collaborate on a joint project entitled Reaching Out for the N.E.S.E.V.E.N. , able to create vocal, instrumental dramaturgies and cohesive and complex choreographies.

Contemporary musical theater is constantly evolving by elaborating forms of the past that can give meaning to the present and to the complex global reality in which we live. The compositional voices of the Iranian Mehdi Jalali, of the American representative of Afro-Diasporic Experimentalism Yvette Janine Jackson, the group of Native American composers highlighted by the collective project of the Shenandoah Conservatory return to contemporary musical theater the denunciation of spoliation, of abuse, of denial of rights, lack of recognition and respect for sexual identity, still under our eyes.