ox&öl | Text: Adelheid Duvanel
Picture: Simone Keller, Lara Stanić, Andreas Müller-Crepon mit VR-Brillen und Blasinstrumenten © Michelle Ettlin
Music theater with texts by Adelheid Duvanel and music by Lara Stanić for enchanted violin bows, singing teapots and magical radio antennas.
Together with composer Lara Stanić and long-time radio host Andreas Müller-Crepon, the collective ox&öl transforms seemingly familiar devices and creates new apparatuses from billiard balls, propellers, and violin bows. Historic radio devices are used, serving as gateways to the world, mediating instruments, and wonder machines. These are replaced by modern, adaptive AI robots, the so-called "healing robots," developed during the pandemic with a "hug mode" for people living alone.
Not only the "Windgeschichten" (Duvanel's first of six volumes published by Luchterhand) seem to have been waiting for Lara Stanić's compositions, but also the many concrete references to music, that "ohne X und ohne U" will transform into scenic-musical situations.
Adelheid Duvanel's literary work is dedicated to the "smallness" and brings the socially marginalized into focus: the wounded and overlooked, the abused and rejected, the loners and outsiders. Prominent critics admired her, attesting to her sovereign command of form and calling her "a master of conciseness." For the six books of short stories published during her lifetime with Luchterhand, Duvanel received several awards. Nevertheless, her work remains largely unknown to the public, and her books were out of print for years following her death in 1996.