About
Kommando Himmelfahrt
Kommando Himmelfahrt is a cross-genre theatre group led by the Hamburg composer Jan Dvořák, the Berlin director Thomas Fiedler and the dramaturge and production manager Julia Warnemünde.
In mostly large-scale productions, they combine music theatre, performance, video art and concerts to create philosophical theatre compositions. Avant-garde montage techniques meet revue and song, band music meets classical choral and orchestral elements, lecture performance meets cinematic realism.
Kommando Himmelfahrt deals with utopias and myths, examines their potential and projects them back onto the present. The group works for independent production centres as well as for theatres and opera houses.
Thomas Fiedler grew up in Bonn and Brussels. He studied music theatre directing in Hamburg and has lived in Berlin and Umbria for 20 years. He presents his cross-genre productions between spoken and musical theatre at numerous opera houses and theatres in Germany and abroad. In 2008, together with the Hamburg composer Jan Dvořák, he initiated the artist group Kommando Himmelfahrt, which deals with border areas of political and scientific utopias.
He was a member of the artistic direction of the Theater Aachen and took over the management of the Junges Staatstheater Berlin on an interim basis as chief director and deputy artistic director. He also works as a recurring curator at the Mannheim Summer Festival. Several of his productions have been honoured with awards and invited to festivals. His interest in new forms of music has led to recurring collaborations with many contemporary music ensembles.
Julia Warnemünde, born in Hamburg in 1985, studied theatre studies and comparative literature in Bochum, Copenhagen and Amsterdam from 2005 to 2011. She has been producing independent theatre since 2010 – both as an artistic dramaturge and as a production manager. Her work has taken her to the Schauspielhaus Bochum, Fringe Festival Amsterdam, Kampnagel, Arches Live Festival Glasgow and the Impulse Theatre Festival, among others. Julia Warnemünde has been part of the theatre group KOMMANDO HIMMELFAHRT since 2013. From 2016 to 2021, she worked as a dramaturge at the Mannheim National Theatre Opera, where she was responsible for innovative concerts such as ‘Musiksalon’ and ‘NTM/Pop’, opera dramaturgies and special projects. In addition to the KOMMANDO HIMMELFAHRT projects at the Nationaltheater, a particular highlight of her work was the opera version of Björk’s album ‘Vespertine’, which premiered in the 2017/2018 season under the direction of the artist collective Hotel Pro Forma. She has been working as a freelance dramaturge since 2021 and curates the programme of the Mannheimer Sommer festival at the NTM, among others.
Jan Dvořák is a Hamburg-based composer, dramaturge and author. He studied composition, theory and musicology in his home city and in Vienna; he then took up additional conducting studies. His works range from performative projects, chamber music and theatre to the operas ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’. He has worked with Sebastian Baumgarten, Reinhild Hoffmann, Andrea Moses, Anna Viebrock, Johannes Schütz, Roger Vontobel, Matthias v. Hartz and especially intensively with Philipp Stölzl. In 2008, he founded the group Kommando Himmelfahrt with Thomas Fiedler and Julia Warnemünde, which has since dedicated itself to utopian-popular music theatre. Jan Dvořák was a lecturer at the Zurich University of the Arts from 2012. In 2016, he became head dramaturge at the Nationaltheater Mannheim and developed numerous new formats, series and projects, such as the opera ‘Vespertine’ based on Björk’s album and the ‘Mannheimer Sommer’ festival. He has been working as a freelance artist again since 2019. In the 22/23 season, he was Composer in Residence at Camerata Bern (audio theatre ‘Utopia’); the Bern Theatre celebrated the world premiere of his drama opera ‘Carmilla’ in 2022. Following the new version of ‘Andersen’s Tales’ for the Residenztheater in Munich, new plays will be on the programme at the Bregenz Festival, in Mannheim and at the Freiburg Theatre in 2024.