Susanne Kennedy
Markus Selg
Philip Glass Einstein on the Beach

Half a century after its creation, Susanne Kennedy – invited for the first time to the Festival d’Automne – endows Einstein on the Beach, the mythical opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, with all of its impact as contemporary ritual, bringing us a post-humanist work of total art. Taken up with notions of time and space, the show places the audience at the heart of a true musical and visual maelstrom.

Since it was first performed in 1976, Einstein on the Beach has become one of the legendary musical works of the XX^th century. Presented at the Festival d'Automne in 1976, 1992 and 2013, the work, or rather this radical artistic and temporal experience, is an opera of the third type. Initiatory and multisensorial, machine-like and Dionysian, it is a visual and sound-based maelstrom driven by an irresistible, trance-inducing form of energy. Indeed, its effect is such that it seemed impossible to separate Einstein on the Beach from its two young creators, the composer Philip Glass and the director Robert Wilson. The opera was, however, almost destined to be a source of inspiration for the director Susanne Kennedy, whose work has never ceased exploring the questions of ritual and mask, as well as the place of the voice and body. Alongside the visual artist Markus Selg, she immerges the audience in the midst of the performers, in a hallucinatory, revolving decor which is both part-primitive and part-futuristic, psychedelic and cybernetic. It invites us to experience in an entirely new way the immense power of this contemporary ritual.