Luxury, power and fashion in Bizet's "Les Pêcheurs de perles"

Ersan Mondtag: We actually found that very obvious. The pearl fishermen are initially about the exploitation of nature. Historical pearl fishing was a brutal process in which people risked life and limb for the luxury of others. If you want to bring this material into the present day, you need a field in which this danger and this logic of exploitation are still real. Dyeing is very similar in this respect: toxic processes, precarious work, dangerous conditions. This is precisely why we decided to replace the pearl with textiles.

Actually, the city with the dye works came first. Immediately afterwards came the idea of using the shopping mall as a kind of frozen metaphor for the temple, cast in marble as it were. It was not to be a naturalistic shopping mall, but an exaggerated form in which consumption and sacralization collide. We later realized that this temple would be too rigid in its pure form. So we also drew the world of work into this second area: the same people who previously worked in the dye works later reappeared as staff in the mall. Not as customers, that was important.

What interests me about it is the cynicism. In fashion, there is always a tendency to aesthetically ennoble the world of work, poverty or supposedly simple clothing and transform it into luxury. You take fabrics or appearances that are actually associated with work, hardship and exploitation and then place them in a luxury context as a sophisticated gesture. The fact that something that was once functional and precarious suddenly returns as an ennobled commodity: for me, this is precisely where a great perversion lies.

I wouldn't say that I'm criticizing the richness of the image itself. For me, these are two different things. The real question is: what is worth spending resources on? And I think it's worth it for art. Theater is not a false waste. Images are created, events are exaggerated and heightened, people gather in a certain place for a certain time. You have to become more self-confident again. Art is not something that always has to be morally justified first. It is a value in its own right.

Precisely because art is a place of concentration, it can also produce wealth. And I actually think it is political to spend resources on theater. Art and theater are not superfluous luxuries. They create publicity, encounters, exchange and a form of shared experience that can hardly be created in any other way.

The point is that we in Europe no longer have any gods in the old sense. Of course there are people who are religious. But the religious infrastructure that really orders life has largely disappeared. People no longer believe that real life begins after death. So they have to realize themselves in life. And then the question arises: What do you live for? What is worth living for?

I do believe that fashion, beauty and art have a function in this search for meaning. Good fashion can be an expression of individuality. It can give shape to how you position yourself in the world.

Yes, exactly. Democracy is an idea. Perhaps there are better ideas. You have to take the freedom to think that at all. Not in the sense of: away with democracy. But in the sense of: Why should we pretend that the development of political thought is complete?

We need to regain the freedom to think about other options. Maybe there are better models, maybe not. I don't know. But there could be some. People are creative after all. Imagination is not decoration. It is a condition for not resigning oneself to the given.

If we stop imagining other forms, both aesthetically and politically, then we are only managing what is already there.

Very much so. Otherwise it wouldn't be an opera. I'm never just interested in illustrating an idea. I'm interested in creating a world in which beauty, longing and fantasy also have a place. Especially when you talk about exploitation, coercion and violence, you can't simply drive out the poetic. It is often precisely this beauty that draws us into a perception in the first place.

So it is precisely this contradiction that interests me: that the poetic charge here is carried by characters who are not innocent in this system. This doesn't make the drama weaker, but stronger.

What interests me is that it is not an official law and yet it is followed by everyone. It's like a silent agreement between the places of production and the places of consumption, between those who have to produce and those who want to buy without having to know too much. Everyone benefits from the fact that the exploitation is not visible.

In this respect, for me it really is a modern form of vow. In Bizet's opera, there are vows, prohibitions, religious commitments. In our present day, there are often invisible social agreements instead. Nobody says them, but they still structure everything.

Yes, absolutely. What interests me about this opera is that it doesn't just consist of the present. In fact, something from the past constantly enters the present. The characters carry around old vows, old images, old hurts. They don't act freely from the moment, but in a field of past promises and memories. That's why, for me, the play is not just a drama of jealousy. It is an opera about the fact that the past does not go away.

Exactly. Modern systems don't work without myths. They just tell their stories differently. There are brand myths, stories of advancement, lifestyle sagas, success stories, icons. The present also produces its legends.

The opera, as it stands, could not simply have been performed unbroken today. Everything is mixed together: religious symbols, colonial ideas, a diffuse exoticism. From today's perspective, it is in many ways presumptuous. But of course you also have to see the work in the context of its time.

It was clear to me that it would be a shame not to play the music because of these problems. So you have to find a way to rewrite the work scenically without betraying it. I would therefore say: at second glance, I am faithful to the work. I change the symbols, nature becomes work, temple becomes temple of consumption, but within that the constellations of characters and relationships remain the same.

I believe that without imagination, everything would be unbearably flat. I'm not interested in putting theories on stage, but worlds. And in these worlds there can be harshness, but also beauty, seduction, night, distance, splendor. This is precisely what makes them perceptible. Perhaps that really is the core: that art creates a space in which contradictions are not smoothed out, but shine.