Der schwarze Mönch

In the organizer's words:

What is it all about?

Kirill Serebrennikov says: "How can we find strategies to survive? By work? By love? By art? "It's an amazing story about a man who turns mad and about his kind of parallel life."

And when asked how he would like to tell the story: "It's like a poetic thriller. Of course I would like to make it with video, with live music and opera singing."

Kirill Serebrennikov is a boundary-breaking Gesamtkunstwerker who often seeks the crossover of drama, physical and musical theater in his works. He is a free spirit and a star of European director's theater. His productions can be seen at the major European festivals, he has a special friendship with Avignon, and he directs at the major opera houses, most recently "Parsifal" at the Vienna State Opera. He also makes films. Now he's coming to the Thalia!

"I have been in contact with him for many years and am happy that now, after his guest performance of "Who is happy in Russia" at the Lessingtage 2019, a Serebrennikov production could finally take place at the Thalia. Against all odds, and therefore all the more possible. Kirill Serebrennikov respects the rules imposed on him and transcends them with his art without becoming embittered." (Joachim Lux)

For a while, the Thalia Theater talked to Kirill Serebrennikov about Parsifal and his dream-dancing view of an alien world. The result was the Chekhov story "The Black Monk", which is virtually unknown in this country. The story can be told from different perspectives. Put simply, it is about freedom. It is about man's irrepressible longing for freedom and self-determination, for what is special and unique, for art and genius, and about the experience that this can lead to self-destruction - a "Hamlet" figure, torn between the requirement to integrate into the social body and the demand to be unique and special. It is about a gardener who tends his garden with dedication and self-sacrifice, from which he lives, to whom everything special is alien, but to whom serving work is sacred, about his daughter, who seeks redemption from the garden fron in the power of love, and - last but not least: about an undead black monk borrowed from Arab legends, who could also come from the arsenal of Edgar Allan Poe. Chekhov takes the conflict between human mediocrity and the hypostasis of the ego to the extreme. And Kirill Serebrennikov intensifies the basic constellation through the musical-compositional form of the rondo.

'How can we find strategies to survive? ', asks Serebrennikov. Chekhov asks these questions, Serebrennikov asks them, but everyone has to answer them themselves. There is no other way.

Incidentally, the concept of man as a "herd animal" also played a role in Chekhov's work more than a hundred years ago. We have just had to be reminded of this term again, a hard to bear, Copernican "insult" so to speak, and how many times has it actually happened? Do we have to accept these epochal "slights"? Can we overcome them? In the sense of freedom? What exactly does it consist of? Or is it really about the dawn of a post-human age that leaves these lines of conflict behind?"

An international production with Russian, German, American, Armenian and Latvian artists

Duration 2:40h, no intermission

World premiere January 22, 2022, Thalia Theater