The project investigates production patterns, role models and interaction mechanisms in the contemporary advanced music theatre. Starting point is the thesis that the workflows in this field are currently undergoing fundamental changes: Collective authorship and experimental developments of new pieces during the rehearsal process are increasingly replacing text orientation, traditional specialization and conventional division of labour. Thus disappears the overall dominance of the integral “work” and its monological attitude. Instead, structural complexity in music theatre is more and more shifted to decentered, network-like organized interactions.

The investigation of this new creation modes requires a methodological shift: The focus in this project is more on process observation than on common score/text analysis. The participant observation of several exemplary productions and their institutional frameworks aims to outline the laboratory character of the contemporary advanced music theatre. The findings of this empirical investigation will be verified using methods of “art practice as research”: experimental arrangements in an own academic “music theatre laboratory” will focus some important production characteristics of the current practice and their influence on the aesthetic results.

Leo Dick, born 1976 in Basel, is a composer and stage director. He studied with Friedrich Goldmann (Berlin University of the Arts) and Georges Aperghis (Bern University of the Arts). His artistic work is focussed on forms of composed theatre. He works as a research associate in the research focus area ‘Interpretation’ at the Bern University of the Arts.