Bing

The title Bing refers to Beckett’s eponymous play of 1966. The play presents us with a single, surreal setting: a naked man standing in a white cube. The script consists of several speech fragments, brought together into a circuit of new, composite phrases. Only two words manage to cut through the ceaseless circling: BING, often connected to the quest for nature, meaning, images, a fellow human being and the way out; and HOP, often followed by the word “elsewhere”, perhaps referring to a change of place and scenery. “I had a completely frozen music theatre in mind”, explains Detlev Müller-Siemens; a music theatre “consisting of three levels: fi rstly the main character, who – because of his isolation – hears him/herself speaking with a stranger’s voice, and is thus impersonated by two vocal parts; secondly the two speakers, who classify the action with permanent comments from the outside; and thirdly the chamber orchestra, functioning as a sterile environment – just like the cube with its white walls – where ‘signs without meaning’ appear, fi lling the space with ‘whispered gibberish’. [...] In spite of this frozen constellation, I think that Bing’s adaptation into an ‘Opera’ allows fundamentally human topics such as loneliness, love and death to shine through. (Source: Theater Bonn 2001)