»We begin by conducting a detailed study of the opera house, looking at various roles onstage and back stage. We’ll be taking a light-hearted approach to the narratives of the canon and developing an installation that presents different roles as options. ›Blonde‹ is one category that comes with a certain baggage and immediately conjures up certain mental images that can spell trouble. Since time immemorial ›blonde‹ has symbolised innocence and youth. The Nazis hijacked blonde in the cause of their Aryan ideology. Blonde vamps shimmered best against a black celluloid backdrop. When we think of stars such as Blondie and Madonna, who unapologetically took over that shade and made it their own, then the question poses itself: haven’t we got beyond the blonde cliché now? Sorry, but no we haven’t! For us the colour is symptomatic of boundaries between gender identities, boundaries that, despite all pretence to the contrary, still exist and look set to exist for some time.

We want to see the establishment of an egalitarian society – but how far are we towards achieving it? Our society does not guarantee equal rights on a social and political level. Less than a fifth of key posts (directors, artistic directors) in theatre are taken by women – and of those, most are not associated with big-name stages and theatres. The situation is worse at opera houses. This state of affairs is also evident in other sectors where considerable money and power is involved, in supervisory councils and boards of directors. Why is it that conceptions of gender roles appear to persist as they do? In our view, the desire to assert and establish alternative lifestyles and power structures has nothing to do with gender-specificity.

Following an intensive period conducting THE BLOND PROJECT at the Wiener Burgtheater we, Chez Company, are now in a position to explore these questions further and team up with Julia Dalis-Hansen and composer duo Thomas Kürstner and Sebastian Vogel in the Deutsche Oper Berlin to pose these questions anew. Far from being a definitive work, THE MAKING OF BLOND is a process. The libretto, the score and the staging of the piece are all being created jointly and are the result of a group effort.«

Gesine Danckwart works as an author and director of drama, film and art projects at a number of theatres and independent international contexts. Since 2011 she has been working with the Berlin-based drama collective Chez Company on projects such as »Barfactory: Chez Icke« and in Peking in 2018 was involved in »Avatar Tales«. She lives in Berlin and has worked in Mannheim, Munich, Vienna, Hamburg, Shanghai, Johannesburg, São Paulo and Bydgoszcz