Life on Earth

Four people are stranded in an empty room, no longer able to escape - except by singing. Using songs and symphony fragments by Gustav Mahler, Thom Luz and his ensemble create a brief world history using only sounds. The production explores the musical capabilities of an empty hall on the verge of time, in which four singing, doubting figures are stranded, in order to rearrange Mahler's huge orchestral scoring into chamber music for quite unusual instruments.
Mahler's music bears the imprint of melancholy, of excessive demands and anxiety due to the fast-changing world around the turn of the centuries. It tells of the disruption and contradictions characteristical to our lives then and now, and translates these into symphonic and song-like narratives, torn between larger-than-life cheer and world-embracing sadness. Hence, somewhere between musical Robinsonade and abysmal Beckett waiting room an associative space about the life of the earth and its strange inhabitants opens up, in which one can rediscover Mahler as well as the connection between world weariness and optimism towards change.
Just like Mahler's songs and symphonies, Luz's musical theatre evenings deal with a cosmos of decline, despair, decay and worldly exhaustion - yet they never seem bleak; on the contrary, instead his works brim with quiet humour and enchantingly beautiful theatrical moments.