»L’invitation – Die Einladung« (UA) | Musik 21 Festival

An evening for everyone, filled with music and people. A participatory music theater and educational project featuring young people from a wide variety of backgrounds, nationalities, genders, and sexual orientations.

“L’invitation” – The World Premiere

All cultures have their own festivals and ceremonial rituals. Being a host is a great honor all over the world. The collectif barbare, together with its ensemble of people from diverse backgrounds, invites the audience to a celebration all its own—one that brings everyone together around a single table and transforms the theater into a place of encounter with the unfamiliar.

Accompanied by pleasant background music, the audience enters the hall. They discover a welcoming space with tables and benches—a setting that might be reminiscent of a company party or a year-end gala. The play, performed right in the middle of the audience, begins with an orchestra and songs, surprises for the children, and announcements over the microphones. From this beginning, a multi-layered acoustic and visual journey unfolds. The space transforms into a company cafeteria or the lounge of an airship, and suddenly we find ourselves part of an open-air wedding celebration in southern Afghanistan. Like a kaleidoscope, different worlds unfold over the course of this magical journey, theatrically exaggerating the performers’ realities and thus bringing them into sharp focus.

In most cases, an invitation means that the invited person is welcome and that their presence is desired. This takes on a completely different meaning when one realizes that a significant portion of the participants in L’INVITATION—who are now sitting on the festival benches in the middle of the audience—are not exactly welcome in many parts of Switzerland.

“What Kind of Times Are These?” – The Musik 21 Festival 2026

Silence or outcry? Act, react—but how? Or look away? Caught between power and powerlessness, between shouting and silence, the Musik 21 Festival 2026 unfolds its program and takes up Bertolt Brecht’s question: “What kind of times are these?”—a question that remains as relevant today as ever.

“What kind of times are these?” wrote Bertolt Brecht in 1934 in his poem “To Those Yet to Be Born,” lamenting that a conversation about trees was almost a crime because it implied silence about so many atrocities. In this way, he responded artistically to the silence surrounding the atrocities of his time, which are likely similar to our own: fascism, militarism, the threat of war and annihilation, and, not least, a hegemonic callousness.