The Shark’s Pretty Teeth

“Thinking about opera perhaps images come to mind of screaming divas on stage in elaborate dresses and costumes. An attentive audience, dressed for the occasion engaged in the passions expressed on stage. Opera is a form that is generally associated with reinforcing a feelgood factor about the status quo. A kind of antiquated entertainment for the well off in society. But is this really so? The opera La muette de Portici, is said to have sparked the Belgian revolution in 1830 and the Marriage of Figaro is an adaptation of a play that was deemed too revolutionary by the French court.

Taking its title from ‘Die Mortitat von Mackie Messer’ – The Shark’s Pretty Teeth is an opera produced by students of the Fine Arts department of the KABK (Koninklijke Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten, The Hague). Over the course of several weeks, the students spent time thinking about opera as political language, taking cues from Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre and exploring the theatre as a forum for political ideas. Brecht developed his Epic Theatre in tumultuous times between monarchy and dictatorship, between luxury and misery, between war and peace. What does it mean to think about his strategies in our current time, that so rapidly seems to become more and more shaky? And furthermore how do you collaboratively produce an opera, while disregarding its traditional hierarchical structures present in both its production and performance?

Without claiming any definite answers to these questions, but rather keeping them in the back of our mind, we produced The Shark’s Pretty Teeth – taking especially one quote from the movie Amadeus to heart:

Sire, only opera can do this. In a

play, if more than one person speaks

at the same time, it’s just noise.

No one can understand a word. But

with music, with music you can have

twenty individuals all talking at

once, and it’s not noise – it’s a

perfect harmony. Isn’t that marvellous?”

Nieuwe Vide’s Journal of Humanity no. 4

With this project a new number of Nieuwe Vide’s Journal of Humanity will be released. NVJOH no 4 will be about Bertolt Brecht. The magazine will be released in january 2017, and includes articles by a.o. Millie Taylor, Kester Freriks, Luuk Verpaalen, Doc Rossi, Patricia Simpson and Michiel Westbeek, a cartoon by Schwantz and illustrations by Illustrarie.