In this forest the longing for transformation pulls from both sides (with sometimes radical consequences): The mermaid Rusalka wants to become a person in order to be able to love the prince in the light of day, but has to give up shape and voice. The prince, on the other hand, to whom everything can belong in the order of the human world, must have led the search for something specific to Rusalka's mysterious pond during the night. Many versions of this story (HC Andersen, Melusine, Disney's Arielle and many more) have been interpreted through queer readings as a portrait of a life that is only possible in secret and the pain associated with it. Following this line of thinking, director Bastian Kraft depicts the hybrid forest and water creatures in Antonín Dvořák's ghostly beautiful opera Rusalka, which tells the story of parallel worlds at nightDrag and burlesque performers to the side. With their imaginative, fluid performance of gender that speaks of freedom, they counteract a world that is thoroughly obsessed with fixed role models. In Rusalka's case, however, the rifts of this otherness cannot be bridged without a voice (and without a common language of desire): a foreign princess, as the long arm of the norm, ultimately poisons the love between the prince and the incarnate mermaid. In his operatic debut, Bastian Kraft examines what a world should look like in which difference no longer means incompatibility, in an empathic examination of the permeability of boundaries and the opportunities for metamorphosis. The musical direction is in the hands of the Ukrainian star conductor Oksana Lyniv
