BAROCCO#spielmitfeuer

Under house arrest, Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov began in 2018 to develop a musical manifesto for freedom. Setting out from real acts of resistance against various systems, such as the Parisian student protests of 1968 and Jan Palach’s self-immolation in protest against the Soviet invasion, Barocco is a synthesis of opera, theatre and dance. At its centre are music and Baroque arias by Bach, Monteverdi, Handel, Rameau, Vivaldi and others: the triumph of excessive beauty, that which is special and unique and rarely finds its place in the world. It takes the very original meaning of the word baroque: an irregular, crooked pearl that will not quite fit a necklace. Barocco is a manifesto for an artistic uprising against a world that is in danger of suffocating at hand of its societies’ constraints.