Kerstin Steeb & Team

Based on research into opera singers' experiences of discrimination, Hamburg-based music theater director and Pro-Quote activist Kerstin Steeb develops IT'S A MASS, an opera wrestling show that moves opera, the supreme cultural discipline, from its throne into the ring. Together with singers whose work biographies have been scarred by the opera business, she dares to rethink the genre musically and structurally. The focus is on a queer-feminist perspective that dissolves discriminatory casting policies and reactionary structures in a performative way. The singers step into the ring and deliver themselves in satirizing but also intimate matches to their personal experiences of discrimination in order to emerge strengthened from the struggles. In many voices, sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, humorously and also angrily, they question their relationship to the apparatus of opera and put their love for their own profession to the test. IT'S A MASS will be a celebration in which hardly a conflict remains unspoken. Kerstin Steeb regularly directs at state theaters and opera houses and knows the opera business from her own experience. IT'S A MASS is her third and largest independent theater production and her first collaboration with Kampnagel.