Roll out, Lift off, Ground Control
For the festival “Mannheimer Sommer 2022” Kommando Himmelfahrt develops a festival trilogy!
ROLL OUT
Premiere 16.06.2022
Mannheim in the year 2022. Illustrious personalities of the Enlightenment – the Tsarina Catherine the Great, the Afro-German philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo and the Mannheim naturalist Cosimo Alessandro Collini – have arranged to meet at the National Theater to finally drop their camouflage after centuries. They are in the highest excitement. For the findings of the Enlightenment have led to the worst ecological catastrophe since the extinction of the dinosaurs, instead of general happiness. It was not meant that way! Now action must be taken. In three staged demonstration marches they approach the theater under tirades, slogans and chants and start the countdown. A countdown? But what for? Only those who join them will find out. – We are unstoppable, another world is possible!
LIFT OFF
Premiere 25.06.2022
For centuries, the National Theater was considered a theater and opera stage. A successful deception.
In reality, the NTM is a hydrogen-powered spaceship to explore future, better worlds. And on the last evening of the festival, we will finally escape into the 23rd century. It must exist, this utopian future in which mankind has already solved all the problems of the climate crisis and lives in abundance, happiness and harmony with nature! After the ceremonial act led by the Enlightener Alessandro Collini with the impressive “Falling Still” by Felix Kubin and the opera studio of the NTM, the countdown of the festival comes to its end. Finally, the good old NTM takes off in a play of lights by projection artist Katrin Bethge. Fortunately, the crew still has room on board. So the audience is invited to be trained as members of the crew and embark on the adventurous journey. The spaceship will glide through the vastness of the cosmos for an entire night and will not land back in Mannheim until breakfast time on Sunday.
Then it’s time to say: Welcome to the future!
GROUND CONTROL
Bar, concerts and parties at the “Salon des lumières
16 – 26 June 2022
Hardly anyone snubbed society as much as the Enlightenment philosopher Julien Offray de LaMettrie (1709-1751). His life was chaotic, his work provocative, his views scandalous. He was far too fond of love, food and thought. In his books Man as a Machine and Man as a Plant, he describes man not as the noblest creature at the pinnacle of creation,
but as a living being among others. LaMettrie’s living and death room was reconstructed by the theater collective Kommando Himmelfahrt
and will now once again become a liquor bar and stage for exquisite band concerts in the NTM’s theater café, to which you can end the festival day or really turn it up again.
After the concerts, the master opens his salon to the public and invites them to have a nightcap. Because only when drunk, says LaMettrie, can you “question human arrogance” and practice new social practices.
