Documentary Methods in Music Theater as a Potential Playground for Artistic Research

In the form of a workshop report, I would like to present the significant increase in the importance of documentary procedures for music theater in recent years and discuss the extent to which this trend raises questions that lend themselves to treatment with methods of artistic research. Starting point are observations from my teaching practice with young music theater makers in the last two years: Our group of students has become markedly more international during this time. As a result, aspects of ‘culture clash’ respectively ‘cultural fusion’ have come to the fore in collaborative projects. For the artistic negotiation of such phenomena of a globalized present, documentary material is increasingly employed. Using the example of a current student project, I will sketch how contemporary music theater practice and artistic research could be linked. In essence, I am interested in discussing the following question: What are the specific possibilities and limits of contemporary music theater to authenticate a social status quo, and what methods can be used to systematically explore and represent them?