Preface to FEED | The Book
FEED | The Story This Far [de]
by Nicodemus - -
FEED, the opera, has a long and multi-faceted backstory. Its evolution from participatory project or devised theatre, to instant opera, a new form altogether, reflects the evolution of my thinking and practice over the past ten years.
In 2003 I had founded the Democracy School in London and by 2012 was working with local communities and their elected representatives on democracy promoting initiatives across England. When in 2010, after 13 years in opposition, a conservative-liberal coalition government came to power under David Cameron, the political and economic climate in the UK changed drastically. The country had already started shifting to the right, hence the change in government, but David Cameron’s austerity agenda and the emergence of identity politics accelerated the rise of populisms and English nationalism enormously and within a few years created an absolutely toxic climate, both socially and politically. Hence, in 2018, after 30 years in the UK, I decided to return to Germany, my country of birth.
When two years later in Berlin, in the spring of 2020, I started work on FEED under the working title of The Devil’s Kitchen, my intention was to create a piece of theatre that would both capture that experience – the dissonance, othering and alienation of a society at odds with itself – and enable me to engage marginalised, unconventional and young audiences critically and emotionally in a conversation about the human cost of living in a fractured and polarised world.
Since social media, were not only instrumental in enabling this 'new populism', but in many instances were also its principle manifestation, it was clear to me from the start, that FEED had to be set in the virtual world of the internet.
I had initially chosen The Devil’s Kitchen (Des Teufels Küche) as its working title, because I conceived the dynamics of populism as a vicious cycle, or what in German would be called a 'devil’s cycle', a Teufelskreis. For me, the idea of the devil’s kitchen also brought to mind Goethe’s The Sorcerer's Apprentice, were once, during his master’s absence, a young apprentice unleashes in his master’s ‘kitchen’ forces that he cannot control, forces that would have destroyed him, had his master not returned in time.
Illustration by Ferdinand Barth (ca 1882). Source: Wikipedia
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This notion of a vicious cycle, combined with the non-linear dynamics at play within social networks, led me to this idea of a circular narrative, and hence a story, FEED, that has neither a beginning, nor an end, a story that endlessly repeats itself without ever repeating itself.
To provide some context, I then placed in this imagined world four cartoon-like protagonists – the compassionate activist, the self-interested entrepreneur, the conscientious technocrat and the self-righteousness politician – whose need for self-realisation and self-preservation, based on carefully curated projections of themselves, both shapes their perceptions, and informs their every action.
That these characters are living out a phony fantasy unrelated to the actual lived experience of ‘real people‘, is not lost on Everyman(1), the story’s aging, white, male antagonist, an exhausted, disillusioned and emotionally confused character, who finds himself left behind and consigned to the dustbin of history by these elites.
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To reflect, in the construction of the work, the virtual reality of these characters, I envisaged to forgo a conventional plod and instead adopt the structure of social media feeds and with it the semantics of social media discourse for the narration. What ‘the road’ does for the road movie, the feed does for this 'net-work'. It is what drives the story and hence takes on the function of a plot.
Having set these basic parameters, I started looking for an electronic composer, who in his or her compositions fuses elements of techno with aspects of musique concrète. At the same time, I had started looking for a writer and performers.
The idea was to develop FEED in the form of a 'Gesamtkunstwerk', a total work of art, where sound, text and image would come together as equals. To this end I imagined we would collect and generate sound, noise and text objects, which we would then work with in rehearsals to jointly assemble our script and score.
However, this is where in 2022 the project got unstuck. Whilst I had managed to bring on board a writer and a composer, I simply could not find five professionally trained actors sufficiently motivated to commit to a self-funded creative process over a sustained period of time. Since without an ensemble to work with the process I had in mind was never going to work, I was left with no choice but to disband the small group that had already formed and start again.
Luckily enough, Stacy Dorgan Bentz, the writer, that had joined the project, was not only still committed to its realisation, but also shared my vision, so that over the next year and a half, between spring 2022 and fall 2023, a more conventional script development process unfolded.
Whilst Stacy kept many of the original elements, including the setting and characters, the circular narrative structure and the idea of a plot represented by a social media feed, she did not view them as constraints. Instead, she worked with and developed them, added depth and context and used them creatively as building blocks, pieces of a puzzle, to create the script [now available in paperback here].
In the meantime, my focus shifted to what was to come next: a series of rehearsed readings, followed by the production and staging of FEED as a spoken techno-opera. This was an ambitious plan and I never had any illusions about how difficult it would be, even for an established producer, which I clearly wasn’t, to raise the funding for a new full-length opera without institutional backing.
To improve my chances, I had broken the project down into three distinct stages: development, readings and production and had decided to bootstrap the first stage, the development of the script and score, so that we would have something to show for when I approach funding bodies. However, that eventually we would have to approach funding bodies, I never called into question. After all, to my mind, this was going to be an epic spectacle, titans of cyber space, slugging it out on the main stage of a grand opera house!
That basic assumption, the idea that a large amount of funding would have to be sought eventually, I now started to call into question, mainly, not because I wasn’t sure how feasible that would be, but because of the likely compromises I would have to accept, if I were to secured that level of funding. What if, I asked myself, there was another way? What would a creative process, a cultural production, look like that doesn’t rely on external funding and the endorsement of established institutions? Would that necessarily have to be a ‘fringe production’?
As I mulled these questions over, I began to think that maybe this was the time to address questions of access and resources, not as separate issues, as something that needs managing alongside a project or production, but as an integral part of the creative process itself, and as decision variables and critical factors that have a direct bearing, not only on the positioning, but also on the form and content of the work we create. And so, whilst I was planning the next stages of the project, I found myself talking about the need to decolonise, democratise and renew the cultural sector – the funding, making and presentation of art in all of its forms.
In the process, I have been rethinking my practice as a director and artist and, building on that, have drafted a manifesto: the Instant Opera Manifesto, which [can be downloaded here]. As we move forward, I will now be applying the ideas and principles that inform and underpin this manifesto to the staging and performance of FEED. This, I have come to believe, will allow us not only to realise the work’s potential, but also to experiment with and create an entirely new art form: a ‘net-work’ presented as instant opera.
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- The character of ‘Mephisto’ (the antagonist in the original concept) evolved over time and eventually became the character of 'Everyman', anchoring the story in the analogue world.
