The Mobile Opera Stage: A Long Journey with Many Stops

Ursula Rüter

Gisela Weimann has been pursuing her opera project since 1991, accompanying the initial vision and the arduous search for financing, the realisation of the content in co-operation with artists from various European countries and artistic fields, to the actual journey in four artistically designed buses in Berlin in September 2001. As a work-in-progress, the Opera for Four Buses has since covered many stages of its journey with different stops.

1st Stop: Moving Images – Seven Days Reflected, for Anna Liffey and Molly Malone, Dublin, Cultural Capital of Europe (1991)

The City Centre Arts Centre. The Still Life Sounds installation was the first scene of a seven-part mirror series, realised as part of the IAWA project Women Artists and the Environment intended to be displayed along the banks of the Liffey River on seven consecutive days. However, for organisational and financial reasons, only this first scene could be realised. The 24 large lattice windows of the culture centre's lengthy exterior were completely covered and distorted by means of various mirror fragment patterns. The windows had movable shutters, and during the performance 24 people opened and closed them with various rhythmic, counterpointed movements. The mirrored images and the reflections of the sun, light and clouds seemed to cause the entire building to move and to come alive.
For the scene of the cycle on the fifth day, Gisela Weimann had planned the work entitled Houses in Motion, where city buses and other vehicles, covered with mirror fragments, were to have driven through Dublin.

2nd Stop: Light/Mirror Weaving, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1997)

A "dress rehearsal” for the Opera for Four Buses was the work Light/Mirror Weaving, which was part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's "Windows on Wilshire“ exhibition series, and which took place in the former May department store next to the museum. Gisela Weimann implemented a concept for the glass door of the main entrance and the two adjacent window displays on each side. Narrow, vertical, double-sided mirror strips were attached at regular intervals to the inside of the glass door and to the display cases. Horizontal mirror strips were attached at regular intervals to the angled backdrops of the display cases and to their floors. All these mirror bands and the remaining glass spaces in between took on the appearance of a woven pattern.
In contrast to the strict, basic principle of the installation, the interplay of the various multiplied reflections created a confusing weave of constantly changing image fragments from the lively surroundings. The fascinating play of the reflections of the light, the passers-by, the traffic and the buildings on the other side of the street, took away the viewer's spatial orientation.

3rd Stop: Follow Me. Test Drive at the Kultur- und Technologiezentrum Rathenau (Rathenau Culture and Technology Centre) in Berlin-Oberschöneweide (2000)

Visitors to the scenic “dress rehearsal” searched for buses in vain. They were only present in one’s imagination. The empty premises of the former cable factory, covering almost ten thousand square metres, were acoustically transformed into a gigantic vehicle that evening.
At the beginning of the performance an electric car, with the words "Follow Me" flashing on and off, went for a few spins around the spacious surroundings of the industrial site and guided the waiting audience through a gate, slowly opening on rollers into the historic factory hall. Here, in the half-light of a space supported by massive steel columns, the visitors were at first left to their own impressions.
Supported by several musicians, each composer ‘steered’ a bus. Friedrich Schenker steered the German bus, Krzysztof Knittel the Polish one, Melvyn Poore the English one, and Patrick Kosk the Finnish one. The four stops and places to change were called Schnee, Wald und Meer (Snow, Woods and Sea; Finland), Geradeaus (Straight On; England), Goethefaustzweischnittchen (Goethefausttwoslices; Germany) and Spiegelverkehrte Reise (Mirror Journey in Reverse; Poland). Georg Katzer’s Motorenlied (Motor Song), a sound collage made of electronically manipulated motor and driving noises, was played at the beginning of the performance and in between, and like an all-encompassing “General Bus,” it linked all four stations to one another. In the expanse of the dark hall, sound and light technology selectively created four spaces, each dedicated to one act and thus to one European country. The light direction created dramatic effects on these ‘islands’ by casting shadows onto the walls and the floor. Coloured light dramatically emphasised the specific character of the four spaces and the music, allowing the audience to feel alternating coldness, warmth, loneliness and danger, while also intermittently doubling and enlarging the actors. During their performance, the actors moved through the space in glittering costumes and illuminated head gear, decorated with geometric mirror elements such as rectangles, squares, triangles and diamond shapes.
Technical installations such as boilers, pipes and iron stairs, or a crane with a platform, were incorporated into the performance as play or instrumentation areas. By following the four acts of the opera, the audience traversed the industrial hall, from one imaginary bus display to another, thereby symbolically crossing Europe.


4th Stop: Artistic Conception and Design of the Mobile Opera Stage (Berlin 2001)

Over the course of many weeks, working with a glassmaker in a workshop yard in Berlin-Wedding, the artist redesigned four well-used city buses from the BVG (Berlin Public Transportation Company) into art objects. This artistic concept picked up the thread of her experiences with the Light/Mirror Weaving installation, in that a strictly geometric design of mirror strips forms a weave completely covering the bus like a second skin, preparing it as shell for her multimedia art project. Gisela Weimann chose a different design to represent each country, created by using 10 cm wide mirror strips attached to the inside and the outside of the buses, and to the windows at 10 cm intervals.
On the “Russian Bus” (which replaced the “Polish” one in the Berlin performance) the mirror segments were arranged vertically; on the “German Bus” they were diagonal; on the “English Bus” horizontal and on the “Finnish Bus” there were in a zigzag line. Additionally, the separate strips were also shifted within each geometric system, causing further multiple refractions and breaks within the reflections.

The arrangement of the mirrors at regular intervals on the windows opened up the view to the outside and created a false impression, because the mirror and the glass surfaces could hardly be differentiated. Inside the German and Russian buses, the small round mirrors on the ceiling created a reflective sky of stars, while in the Finnish bus, the five neon pipes of the normal ceiling lighting was transformed into a 'light ceiling' with eleven neon lamps, and in the English bus, narrow horizontally running mirror strips on the ceiling picked up the basic pattern. Anything in the buses that recalled their use as public transportation remained unchanged, such as the "no smoking," "emergency exit" or "entrance and exit for people with prams" signs. Gisela Weimann loves artistic intervention in familiar everyday situations. With the Opera for Four Buses she is particularly fascinated by the journey in the former city bus, which is no longer a familiar everyday journey for the passengers, but rather presents a completely new visual and acoustic experience. The opera journey in the swaying and humming buses also demanded different ideas and spontaneous reactions from the composers and soloists. It is remarkable how far Gisela Weimann pushes the mirror motif in this work, constantly changing it and making it a medium of communication. In what way does the dialogue between reality and unreality, the interior and exterior world, enter into a complex relationship with the artist's perception of herself and others, other art forms, the artistic forms of expression and the participating visitors?


5th Stop: All aboard! "An Imaginary Journey Through Europe" on the Museumsinsel in Berlin-Mitte (2001)

First performance! The Oper für vier Busse premiered on 31 August 2001 in Berlin-Mitte, in front of the impressive setting of the Altes Museum at the Lustgarten. After many years of preparation, the buses actually began to move. The "Imaginary Journey Through Europe," began on the Museumsinsel (Museum Island), whose many world cultural heritage buildings became the expanded stage setting for the mobile, reflective bus objects. At the beginning of the performance, all four buses stood ready at the foot of the long, grand staircase of the Altes Museum, one behind the other. A resounding bang of a gong marked the beginning of the performance. The group of bus drivers appeared first, in plain colour overalls, then the actors with their glittering costumes and illuminated head gear arrived in the entrance hall of the museum, introducing themselves on the brightly-lit steps. Afterward, each crew went to their bus and invited the viewers to a fifteen minute opera act, according to the number on their entrance tickets. It was not possible to get off or to change buses during the journey. At the end of each experimental musical performance, the audience changed to the next bus. The precisely set choreography of the tour led across the Museum Island at walking pace, along convoluted paths. The caravan rolled from the Altes Museum down the Bodestrasse, past the colonnades of the Alte Naltionalgalerie and the Neues Museum, and into the inner courtyards of the Museumsinsel, which at the time was one of Berlin's biggest building sites. The journey through the cramped area with its containers, hoards, piles of rubbish, buildings and narrow alleys required all the skill of the bus drivers. The four journeys ended again in front of the Altes Museum. An intensive dialogue arose between the soloists and the public through the intimate situation in the buses, as well as the dissolution of the borders between the performance and audience space. The distorted electronic noises of the instrumental compositions were acoustically laid over the real traffic noises inside the buses, whose designs were incorporated into the compositions and the scenic events. In the "Finnish Bus" additional pipes hung from the horizontal safety poles, which were struck like bells during the performance. The "Russian Bus" was filled with plastic tubes, hanging from the ceiling, which were connected to each other by a closed pipe system. The singers used the tubes as 'speaking pipes,' while the public used them as 'listening pipes,' through which the distorted songs could be heard. Each corner of the narrow 'stage' in the passenger space was used by the soloists. Playing music, they paced the walkway between the seats, sat in free seats next to the audience, or placed themselves where prams and luggage is otherwise stored. The experience of the journey in the mobile opera stages differed according to the time of day. During the earlier performances the surroundings appeared more familiar in the fading light and allowed for more concentration on the musical level, while later the entire visual experience was strengthened by the intensive light reflections. Floodlights created effects by throwing the reflecting mirror patterns of the passing buses onto the high facades of the museum buildings along the way. Conversely, the surroundings appeared in shining silver on the surfaces of the buses.

The mobile houses of mirrors put one’s own perception to the test and played upon it, by mixing with reality. For the audience, it was hardly possible to distinguish between the course of the window and the mirror panes or to follow the individual web of mirror bands, even with a lot of concentration.
Infinitely repeated image spaces and fantastic, visually woven patterns created the illusion of a complex spatial theatre with shifting levels, which was strengthened by the view through the open fields of vision at the windows and onto the reflective costumes. In addition, big convex traffic mirrors on the back of the drivers cabins lengthened the passenger space so infinitely, that it was lost in a blurred distance. With the various perception spaces flowing into one another, each participant had individual mirror experiences – and all were made into willing or unwilling actors in the mobile opera performance. The choreography reached its high points when one bus stopped and the others slowly passed it, when the buses overtook each other, drove alongside each other, or performed a proper dance around a big plane tree in the courtyard of Museum Island. In these moments, the overlapping and multiplied reflections of woven forms, encompassing countless smaller picture sequences, seemed like image stills or like a continuing film strip. The separate images were transformed into paintings that illustrated a dreamlike colourful world with a complicated structure. One's own view began to flash. Dizziness set in. Where did the real world begin and end? The intensity of the experience increased with the night-time atmosphere, snatches of words and sounds from the other buses, the open-air cinema in front of the Alte Nationalgalerie, and when everyday noises flew by and were mixed with the music in the buses. Where were we? Locked in, while looking out the window, we met each other and ourselves again and again in our own reflections. Gisela Weimann achieved a removal of borders between internal and external space through reflections and music. The opera has left the opera house and found its public on the street. In this multimedia artistic project, complex reflected layers meet each other, leaving a simple (self) reflection far behind.


6th Stop: Continued Journey – The Mobile Opera Stage on the Road (as of 2002)

It is not yet certain where the journey will go. The Oper für vier Busse is an autonomous mobile opera house on wheels; a potential mirror of many realities.


Translation into English by Gisela Weimann and Siobhan Dowling