“Outreach” is the magic word. Cultural institutions open up to new perspectives, go “outside”, network with their local or wider social environment through specially developed offers. They send employees off to do cultural work, lure people into their home who have previously been too afraid of the threshold or who have had too little interest. Serge Dorny, Munich’s new opera director, is known to be a passionate outreacher. An opera house is not a mausoleum, he once said, and he certainly doesn’t want to be the bouncer of one. He pushed his previous place of work, the Opera de Lyon, far into urban society, making the opera institution more accessible to people of different origins and significantly rejuvenating its audience.
“The future and the relevance of the opera will not only be negotiated on the stage”, Dorny is convinced. In concrete terms, it is also about the rooms, in the opera house and other places in the city, where people enter into a dialogue, where social debates and shared experiences can be possible. For Dorny, therefore, the question of new architectures arises. Not unexciting in a city like Munich, where a couple of new cultural buildings are being celebrated that they come very close to this claim.
The Bavarian State Opera now sees itself in the role of an “initiator”. Together with the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, the Komische Oper Berlin, the Zurich Opera House and the Stuttgart State Theater, she is participating in a digital series of events entitled “Public Spaces in Cultural Buildings of the Future” (https://www.kulturbauten.net). Organized by the “AK Culture. Marketing, Sales, Service”. Among the “experts and visionaries” from whom one expects impulses at the podiums are, for example, Benedikt von Peter, Director Theater Basel, an office for museum and urban scenography, architects, building directors, scientists, urban developers and sociologists.
How is society included in the planning of cultural buildings in a meaningful way? Who are the future users? What does culture do to the city? Exciting questions that will hopefully not get lost in hermetic expert bubble talk. The people of Munich should definitely join in on December 7th (10 a.m. to 12 p.m.), when the auspicious motto is: “Architecture – it has to be brave and crazy”. The architect Peter Haimerl, who has set up an amazing concert hall in Blaibach in the Bavarian Forest and now an old heating plant in Aubing, is discussing “Power Plant Philharmonic” and Christos Chantzaras from “Make Munich Weird”. That’s nice.