ON POPPAEA

There is no doubt that the actions of the brutal ruler Nero have led us to remember him, even today, as among the most vibrant tyrants of Rome. But in the shadows of such a vicious figure - often invisibly - other people are at work. And from their shadowy places, they orchestrate intrigue and, in this case, the most terrible brutalities, without ever having to fear the spotlight on their own misdeeds. In an abstruse mixture of instrumentalized morality is a hardened hunger for power. Everyone fights for their own advantage. It is often difficult to discern if there are, in fact, any victims at all in this story, or if they simply harm each other to the extent of their respective abilities. Is anyone in the spotlight automatically a villain?

The relationships and entanglements of the characters are laid out like a finely woven web. Loose connections, tight knots and strong networks characterize the heterogeneous web. Everything is interwoven. There is no pulling without making the whole net shake; no loosening without making the many other links lose their own points of reference. While some skillfully weave new threads, others at times are hardly aware of the enormous strands of power that are placed in their hands: one wrong move and the whole system falters, one mistake and half the net is gone. One thing tied to the wrong leash, and before one knows it, everything unravels.

Simply telling the story of a sick ruler and his sick companions in an equally sick system would, however, be an all too easy escape into the ancient material. To paraphrase Goethe's Faust:

My friend, all of the ages that are gone / Now make up a book with seven seals. / The spirit of the ages, that you find, / In the end, is the spirit of Humankind: / A mirror where all the ages are revealed.

But it would be too trivial to specifically point the finger at the present day: Nero is not a current autocrat, and Poppaea is not simply the Roman image of a scheming influencer. Rather, the urgent question is how much of Nero and Poppaea each of us lets out, for the sake of self-advancement or simply out of convenience. How much do we build, how much do we destroy? How much damage do we find just about tolerable so we can to continue to cultivate our favorite prejudices?

The 'skene', originally a simple wooden structure in the ancient 'theatron', took on a central role as stage house for the locus of the action. It helped to suggest architectures and served as a scaffolding for stage sets that would transport the audience into the world of the drama being portrayed. The action of Poppaea takes place mainly in the palace of imperial Rome. What could be more natural than to draw a picture of the Domus Aurea: the golden house with exorbitantly lavish furnishings that Nero had built after the burning of Rome, about which he supposedly said, after moving in, that it was now finally worthy of a human being. Poppaea, however, sees this house quite differently in the libretto: "It's too big. I get lost when I try to take a bath. This house is as big as a city. A labyrinth of passages leading nowhere."

Half parading, half erring, Poppaea, Nero, and their court wander through the glittering house. It is made of translucent walls that show glimpses and then conceal again. Meticulously threaded and balanced, thousands of bottles come together to form a unified whole. The boundaries between reality and illusory pretension are blurred. Are these bottles valuable material or just nicely presented refuse? In its dynamic, the stage design reflects the ambivalent questions of the opera, and in its materiality it also refers to much more everyday confrontations. We know that we produce a lot of waste. Are sustainable materials better? Maybe we should use glass bottles -  they feel much more valuable. But if we take the time to compare the ecological footprints more closely, we are perhaps shocked to discover that it is not at all clear what is less harmful to our environment. Even a glass bottle leaves its mark, which, depending on the journey, can exceed that of a plastic one.

Inevitably, we classify what we see into one preconceived value system or another. The "innocent eye", as John Ruskin would have wished, a value-free way of seeing, isn't something we will achieve. Rather, we are forced to learn, like Georges Didi-Huberman:

"What we see looks at us.” ['Ce que nous voyons, ce que nous regarde'].

It looks at us in the light of our biases and at best manages to shake them up a little. Perhaps somewhere in the reflections and obfuscations, a small bit of insight catches our eye; into the hubris of our species, into our well-intentioned and yet disastrous actions. Beyond anger or ambition, which make us equally blind with rage.

As the plot unfolds, the initially grave entity of the facade begins to crumble. At first, it is small injuries: Someone pushes through the shimmering rows and reveals the fragility of the membranes. Then, at some point, whole strands begin to rush down: Perforating these layers of space subtractively opens up spaces that reveal details and key scenes and are occupied by the actors. While the opening of the curtains initially creates exciting new spaces, it becomes more and more clear that, as it progresses, it proceeds inexorably to ruination. The house is abandoned to a blind lust for destruction. What remains is a toxic world left behind for posterity. And as if that wasn't enough, on the wreckage from which it had built its glittering house, this society beats, unto death, its own unborn continuation.