In the organizer's words:

About the power of kindness and compassion.

A Christmas Carol, based on the story of the same name by Charles Dickens, is a musical theater piece with music by UMS 'n JIP (Ulrike Mayer-Spohn and Javier Hagen), directed by Wolfgang Beuschel. A Christmas Carol transforms the well-known story into an 80-minute musical soundscape - a performative radio play, so to speak - that subversively mixes electropop with experimental sounds: Morton Feldman and Bronski Beat join hands here.
UMS 'n JIP are interested in gray areas, transitions, sound spaces, the ambivalence of a word between sound and meaning, the ambivalence of an image between appearance and meaning, the simultaneity and interweaving of different media.

As if guided by a ghostly hand, video projections, music, song and staging interact: footage of Accra's mountains of waste, Vietnamese war victims, industrial slaughterhouses and American slums flicker - you hardly notice - backwards across window openings reminiscent of Christmas baubles, mysteriously interwoven with the duo's sound mixes. Analogous to a fragmented perception of reality, the video projections appear fragmented, and always through different glasses. As soon as Scrooge's soul takes a turn for the better, the images - footage of dangerous school routes in Latin America - flow forward. It's never too late in life, though not easy, to learn and do things better.

With their 'electropop operas' ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, EINER, SANCHO, numerous semi-staged and performative commissions and the musical theaters in collaboration with the CETC at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, UMS 'n JIP can look back on years of experience with the genre since 2007. Their works are best classified as instrumental theater and conceptual music theater and play virtuously and not without irony with aesthetics between experimental music and electropop. UMS 'n JIP's Electropop Operas are an unconventional pocket format that combines an artistic high-tech laboratory with maximum agility.

Together with their in-house director Wolfgang Beuschel (Zurich), they take on Dickens' fantastic and socially critical tale with A Christmas Carol and create an enchantingly dreamy sound universe around the touching story. The text is based exclusively on the (abridged and dramaturgically condensed) English original. The performance will be subtitled in German. UMS 'n JIP are responsible for the stage and visuals.

"A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas" from 1843 is one of Charles Dickens' best-known stories. It is about the moneylender Ebenezer Scrooge, an old, grumpy miser who receives a visit from his deceased partner Jacob Marley and then from three other ghosts in a single night, who ultimately help him to change his life. A Christmas Carol contains strong social criticism, with which Dickens denounces the grievances of 19th century England. Probably the greatest legacy of his Christmas story, however, is the message that kindness and compassion for one's fellow human beings are among humanity's greatest assets. Not just at Christmas, but all year round.

electropop opera based on the novel
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
English (German subtitles)
2020, world premiere

Original text: Charles Dickens
Libretto & Music: UMS 'n JIP
Stage Director: Wolfgang Beuschel
Stage & Light Design: UMS 'n JIP
Performers: Ulrike Mayer-Spohn, Javier Hagen