German opera director to found aid project in Burkina Faso

Jan 31, 2010, 12:06 GMT

Berlin - A leading German operatic director, Christoph Schlingensief, 49, is to lay the foundation stone on February 8 in Burkina Faso for an 'African Opera Village,' a Berlin-funded aid project to encourage musical theatre.

In an interview Sunday in Berlin, Schlingensief, 49, said he was flying to the African nation this Wednesday for the preparations. He expected 13 shipping containers with equipment to arrive there by sea and road in the next few days.

The spiral-form building, to be erected in a village on the outskirts of Ouagadougou, will include a school to teach music and film, performance spaces, workshops and a clinic. Classes are scheduled to begin in October.

The maverick director is well known in Germany for his provocative, taboo-breaching plays and his production between 2004 and 2007 of Parsifal which is still in repertory at the annual festival in Bayreuth of the operas of Richard Wagner.

In the interview, Schlingensief rejected criticism that the project, which aims to establish an annual opera festival in Ouagadougou, was imposing elite European culture on the people of Africa.

He said he was entitling the project, 'Learning From Africa.'

'This won't be a snobby Bayreuth thing,' he said. 'It will mobilize and support the indigenous cultural energies.'

The Berlin arts figure devised the project after an operation two years ago to save him from lung cancer and writing a book about his brush with death. Francis Kere, a Burkinabe-born architect who lives in Berlin, designed the building.

Schlingensief obtained the funding from the Goethe Institute, Germany's cultural outreach agency, and from the government-funded Federal Foundation for Culture. They are to send executives to join Burkinabe ministers at the VIP opening ceremony.