JANNI YOUNGE PRODUCTIONS
Luke Younge Puppet Mechanist and Rigging | Janni Younge, Luke Younge,
Sean Mac Pherson, Uys van der Merwe, Judy Wainey, Christopher Worthington-Smith,
Rudo Chiyangwa, Belson Malunga, Thokozani Nandolo, Samkelo Zihlangu,
Zuko Nxantsiya, Zubenathi Zide, Siyanda Mzantsi, Sivuyile Gatji Puppet Construction |
Linette van Rensburg Costume Seamstress |

Bridget Hines, Nitya Ramlogan, Annika Schaper, Laura Schulze,
Anastasiia Starodubova, Mayra Stergiou, Tara Younge Assistant Visual Performers

AKADEMIE FÜR ALTE MUSIK
Georg Kallweit Concertmaster | Emmanuelle Bernard, Kerstin Erben,
Thomas Graewe, Barbara Halfter Violin I | Dörte Wetzel, Edi Kotlyar, Erik Dorset,
Edburg Forck Violin II | Clemens-Maria Nuszbaumer, Sabine Fehlandt Viola |
Jan Freiheit, Barbara Kernig Violoncello | Walter Rumer, Raivis Misjuns Double Bass |
Xenia Löffler Oboe, Recorder | Christian Beuse Bassoon | Ute Hartwich,
Sebastian Kuhn Trumpet | Michael Freimuth Lute | Raphael Alpermann Harpsichord, Organ

Teorem Berkay Aksu, Gosia Cnota, Arianna de la Cruz Lara Percussion

Uwe Schneider General Manager | Linus Bickmann Dramaturg and Assistent General Manager |
Irene Deffner Project Management
 

PIERRE BOULEZ SAAL
Kirsten Dawes Artistic Director | Christoph Schaller Dramaturgy |
Clara Marie Stangier Project Managment | Hildegard de Stefano Assistant Project Management |
Oliver Klühs Technical Director | Christian Klühs, Marius Adam Technical Managers |
Helene Mönkemeyer Stage Management

Intimately Human, Larger Than Life
Imagining Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo in Visual Performance

Director’s Note by Janni Younge

Aci, Galatea, e Polifemo is a story of love, yearning, devastation through violence, and ultimately of transformation. Dramaturgically speaking, three figures caught in a destructive relationship make for a familiar dynamic. These figures here, however, are not simply human.

They are born of the gods of Greek mythology, larger-than-life and timeless emanations of humanity’s relationship with our world, and closely connected with the sea, the living land, and the bedrock of the earth. They are both human and beyond human, representations of the forces at play within us and around us. Aci, Galatea, and Polifemo have been represented in European artworks through the centuries. Perhaps they continue to provoke artistic imaginations because their epic dilemma speaks to the depths of our emotional experience.

Our interpretation draws inspiration from the monumental scale of these figures and their mythological origins. Galatea embodies both the sea and a figure emerging from it, fluid and adapting to those around her. Aci represents life on earth, originating as a creature of the land and evolving into a human. Polifemo embodies the potentially explosive powers of nature, the climate, and the bedrock of the earth. Each character takes on multiple forms that evolve in tandem with their emotional journey during the production.

Handel’s exquisite music resonates with the intimate emotional and distinctly human relationships embedded within this story. It echoes through the individual to the collective experience of love and loss. It touches the destruction and anguish that lie within us as individuals and evokes the pain we as societies and as a race know and cause.

This production is inspired by the space of the Pierre Boulez Saal. Designed in the round, it cradles and surrounds us, allowing individual experiences inside a united whole. Utilizing all dimensions of this beautiful structure, our performance extends upward, below, and around the sides. Galatea occupies the center space with her billowing sea-cloth, while Aci moves about and descends from the audience walkway and the giant Polifemo dominates from above.

Aci and Galatea find each other beyond death through transformation. Puppetry is an innately metaphorical medium as the inanimate is given life through a transfer of the performers’ energy. Dance, physical expressive movement, and puppet figures are blended and reconfigured throughout the work. We inhale, exhale, and breathe together. Listening to the breath becomes a conduit for empathy. Breath, the essence of life, forms the most intimate link between our bodies and the world around us. We breathe to give life to the performance forms. We breathe to weave a connective web that spans all three figures reflecting their inseparable interconnectedness and mirroring our own interdependence with each other and with our world.

Janni Younge is an award-winning creator of multimedia theatrical works, with a focus on puppetry arts. This production of Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo at the Pierre Boulez Saal is her first collaboration with Berlin’s Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin.

Mythical Landscapes
Mapping Aci, Galatea e Polifemo

Christoph Schaller

Anyone traveling the east coast of Sicily today cannot help encountering one name over and over: Acireale, Acitrezza, Aci Castello, Aci Catena—all these small towns and villages around Catania recall the mythical shepherd boy Acis (or Aci, in Italian) who is said to have herded his flock here, on the verdant slopes of Mount Etna.

His fate is described in the Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid, written shortly after the beginning of the Common Era: there, Acis appears as the lover of the nymph Galatea, one of the Nereids, the 50 daughters of Nereus, god of the sea. Their idyllic twosome is disturbed by the giant Polypheme, also ardently in love with Galatea and increasingly aggressive in his advances. Rejected by her, the jealous Cyclops kills Acis by smashing him with a boulder. After undergoing the titular metamorphosis into a fresh stream, however, the murdered shepherd flows down to the sea, there to be reunited with his Galatea.

Like many tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this became a popular basis for literary and musical adaptations during the European Renaissance, and certainly by the Baroque period. Over several decades, Handel returned to it repeatedly—the best-known result being the three-part masque Acis and Galatea HWV 49b, written for the King’s Theatre in London in 1732. At that point, Handel’s first setting of the tale was already 24 years old: as early as 1708, he had composed the dramatic serenata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo HWV 72, presumably for a wedding among the Neapolitan nobility.

Provocative Empathy

In Nicola Giuvo, the librettist for his first treatment of the story, the young Handel found a collaborator with an extraordinarily delicate sense for the multi-layered nature as well as the psychological and emotional potential of Ovid’s original. Other contemporary adapters, such as Pietro Metastasio (La Galatea, 1722) or Attilio Ariosti (Polifemo, set by Giovanni Bononcini for the Berlin court theater in 1703), turned the story into a pastoral with an Arcadian setting, mitigating the tragedy of the tale by introducing additional characters and subplots; here, the carefree cheerfulness of the shepherd’s realm is only briefly disturbed by Polifemo’s brutal act of violence (which often takes place off-stage entirely). Such treatments almost involuntarily turn Polifemo into a comical figure; the unkempt giant’s wooing of Galatea seems doltish, his aggressive outbursts almost ridiculous in their awkward crudeness, despite their violence.

Not so Giuvo: he limits himself—presumably also due to the context of the performance as part of wedding festivities—to the three main characters, but his adaptation has all the more depth, never shying away from emotional explicitness. His version of course also includes pastoral elements, but the idyllic scene is fragmented from the outset: even in the first duet between Aci and Galatea, the lovers’ peaceful morning mood is clouded by the awareness of the pain inextricably bound up in their love, a pain that manifests with increasing acuity throughout the piece, finally exploding in a catastrophe. Despite this, they are not cast as passive victims, resigned to their unavoidable fate in lamentation. With youthful heroism (Aci’s aria “Dell’aquila l’artigli”) and self-confidence (as in Galatea’s impressive “Benché tuoni e l’etra avvampi”), they confront Polifemo.

Polifemo, too, is treated by Giuvo in anything but a one-dimensional manner: this cyclops is neither cloddish nor comical, making the destructive brutality of his aggression towards Galatea and Aci stand out all the more starkly. In Handel’s setting, blaring trumpets announce his entrance, as the giant, inflamed by jealousy, confronts the pair of lovers for the first time with all his overwhelming might (No. 7, “Sibilar l’angui d’Aletto”). Altogether, with its highly virtuosic arias, breath-taking coloratura passages, extreme leaps, and enormous tessitura of two and a half octaves, this bass role is one extended demonstration of vocal potency.

But Polifemo is not reduced to a monstrous brute. The pain caused by his unrequited feelings for Galatea is as genuine as his inhuman violence. Handel devotes extensive musical space to this ambivalence in Giuvo’s libretto, inventing ingenious musical invocations: rejected once again by Galatea, who intermittently seeks refuge with her father in the depths of the sea, Polifemo is left alone—hopeless and without the prospect of a happy ending (No. 21, “Fra l’ombre e gl’orrori”). The jagged, leaping motifs that a few minutes earlier evoked the impression of seething rage about to erupt (No. 15, “Precipitoso nel mar che freme”), now turn into the desperate gestures of one deeply wounded, unsuccessfully seeking succor after having lost his bearings, like a moth in the dark. Not only the victims of his barbarian violence, Polifemo himself elicits empathy—without his behavior becoming any easier to condone or justify.

Between Idyll and Abyss

The triangular relationship between Acis, Galatea and Polypheme that Handel and Giuvo stage with such a plethora of facets is an original narrative invention of Ovid. Inserting the figure of Acis into older stories, he created the driving force for a dramatic tale, while Galatea and Polypheme and their relationship date back to far earlier layers of mythology, traces of which run through Ovid’s and thus also Giuvo’s text.

Polypheme makes what is presumably his most famous appearance in an episode of Homer’s Odyssey, written in the 8th century B.C., in which Odysseus, who has lost his way on his way home from Troy, and his crew fall into the hands of Polypheme in the “land of the wild, lawless cyclopes.” Only thanks to his famous cunning can he and the rest of his men—six of whom the hungry giant has already devoured—finally escape his mountain cave. Today, the rock formations jutting sharply from the sea off the Sicilian coast are still called Isole dei Ciclopi (“Cyclopes’ Islands”)—according to Homer’s epic, after being blinded, Polypheme tore these boulders from the mountaintops and hurled them after Odysseus’ ships, to no avail.

While Homer’s “land of the Cyclopes,” like all the fantastical settings of the Odyssey, cannot be precisely located within the real geography of the Mediterranean region, Euripides clearly identifies it with Sicily in his satyr play Cyclops, written approximately 400 years later, in which he gives Homer’s Polypheme episode a comedic reworking. In Sicily, Galatea was revered in a cult casting her as the protectress of milk-giving livestock around Mount Etna and the guarantor of calm, peaceful seas. The motif of Polypheme’s unrequited love for Galatea dates back to around the same time—even though in these sources, the nymph, unlike in her later depiction by Ovid, apparently was not always inclined to reject the cyclops’ advances; some even mention her son by him, Galates.

What the various sources agree upon is the description of Polypheme’s home as a wondrous and horrible place: between the mountaintops inhabited by the giants and the surf of the sea, life flourishes in effortless abundance; crossed by streams, the landscape provides plentiful verdant food for sheep and goats, so that Homer’s Polypheme has acquired a generous supply of exquisite cheese. When the itinerant Odysseus helps himself to it without permission, he encounters the monstrous flip-side of this apparent idyll. Virgil’s Aeneas, another shipwreck victim landing on the coast of Sicily while traveling from the ruins of Troy to his new homeland in Italy, has to flee the wrath of Polypheme and also experiences the island’s misanthropic side: the giant’s roaring stirs the sea, shakes the earth, and reverberates within the craggy caves of Mount Etna, which spews rocks and flames. In Ovid’s version, Polypheme eventually is directly associated, if not identified, with the volcano’s destructive power: jealousy burns hot within him, as if he carried mighty Etna itself in his breast. Some commentators even believe this identification to be the etiological origin of the saga of Polypheme: in this reading, the unpredictable, fire-spitting crater became “rationalized” in the myth as a one-eyed monster—in quite the same way as mythical imagination personified the dangerous currents in the Strait of Messina with the sea monsters of Scylla and Charybdis.

The real historical developments during the so-called archaic period (c. 800–500 B.C.) may lend this interpretation some plausibility: around 800, Greek colonization of the Western Mediterranean gave rise to the first settlements on the east coast of Sicily, including Katane, known today as Catania and already mentioned above. Like their mythical predecessors, the new arrivals had to contend with the ambivalence of their new surroundings: their soil promised nearly unlimited agricultural yields, yet at the same time this paradise was permanently threatened by the uncontrollable forces of nature—first and foremost by the towering Mount Etna, whose destructive outbreaks ironically also laid the foundation for this ecological richness, as its volcanic soil was so fertile. The Greek settlement of Katane was destroyed several times by lava streams during its history.

Back to Nature? A Parable on Change

Echoes of this mythical “natural philosophy” can also be found in Handel and Giuvo’s serenata. While Galatea and “her” element are often associated with circling wave motifs, fiery lightning bolts shoot from Polifemo’s eye (“lampi di fuoco”). A mighty rumbling announces his entrance and makes the earth tremble, musically invoked by Handel in frequent 16th-note repetitions. But Polifemo can also conjure up storms, and, provoked by Aci and Galatea’s resistance, he becomes a torrential river, at least metaphorically, expressed by breakneck cascading scales. He represents something akin to the elementary power of nature per se, and ultimately, neither the sea goddess Galatea nor the human Aci have the means to oppose it.

The fate of the shepherd boy Aci, said to have herded his flock on the verdant slopes of Mount Etna, who was put to death (temporarily) by Polifemo’s rage, marks not only the tragic end of a highly emotional love triangle. It also questions the possibility of human existence when confronted with the forces of nature within our all-important, yet also chaotic, violent, even hostile surroundings—a question acquiring increasingly urgent relevance today, far beyond the realm of Greek mythology and the context of its genesis. Incidentally, Aci’s last words after his metamorphosis are not spoken by himself. Giuvo puts them into Polifemo’s mouth, in a rather unadorned accompagnato. This metamorphosis is no return. “True love never loses hope,” as the following conciliatory final trio states, bidding the wedding guests farewell. Which transformation, on the other hand, may we hope for?

Translation: Alexa Nieschlag

Christoph Schaller studied musicology and philosophy at Berlin’s Humboldt University. Following freelance work as a program annotator for the orchestras and chorus of Bavarian Radio and other concert presenters, he has been a dramaturg at the Pierre Boulez Saal since 2017. His master’s thesis on the performance history of The Messiah won the Research Award of the German Georg Friedrich Händel Society in 2023.

Poetic Fusion
Exploring the Unconventional Marriage of Music Theater and Puppetry

By Mongiwekhaya

In the world of art and performance, the convergence of different mediums sometimes produces the most breathtaking and unexpected results. One such unusual union is the combination of puppetry and Baroque music theater, a fusion that we have been exploring over the past weeks and months in preparation for this production of Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, the first collaboration between Berlin’s Akademie für Alte Musik and director Janni Younge.

Although there is a tradition of puppet theater in Europe, including elements of puppetry being introduced into music theater performance, it has remained an art form more likely to be associated with children’s theater or daytime television than the serious world of opera. True, puppetry is playful; yet in the recent history of theater performance in South Africa, it has taken on a pivotal role in addressing society’s most serious and pressing issues, revealing a passion to delve into the deepest questions of the soul. This very specific theatrical tradition has become one of the country’s most valuable cultural calling cards and continues to evolve in the work of directors such as Janni Younge.

Crisis Point: Puppetry’s Role in South African Healing and Transformation

I am an artist and a South African. I came to puppetry through the 1997 production Ubu and the Truth Commission by the Cape Town-based Handspring Puppet Company, a genre-defining company founded in the early 1980s and considered one of world’s leading puppetry ensembles today. It is hard to convey the shock to the system this production caused, exploring as it did the subject matter of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the TRC, which was established shortly after the end of apartheid with the aim to bridge the gap between political enemies, between victims and perpetrators, where forgiveness is the weapon of choice.

From a distance, these acts of grace appeared noble; for the sake of peace, we did not take revenge on our former masters, but welcomed them to coexist with us in the new republic. But what about the missing sons and daughters? The destroyed homes, the torn families? What about justice? What about reparations for the recent history of political, educational, and economic violence? These were the question at the center of Handspring’s production—questions that lurked in the hearts of all South Africans, secretly voiced in homes around the country, timidly discussed in public arenas, yet here were these questions being addressed publicly through the medium of puppetry.

Ubu and the Truth Commission, written by Jane Taylor and directed by the great William Kentridge, was a groundbreaking production that utilized Bunraku-style puppets designed by Handspring’s founders Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones. Delicately balancing humor and tragedy, it explored the complexities of transitional and restorative justice. It delved into the inconclusive nature of equity and the tensions between forgiveness and retribution, leaving its audiences at place for real conversation. It was the specific form of puppetry that made this conversation possible: it allowed for contemplation at a remove, the real human faces replaced by avatars of wood and fabric, giving South Africans a chance to confront a shared history and admit failure, admit pain.

Handspring Puppet Company’s style is influenced by Bunraku puppetry, a traditional Japanese form dating back to the 17th century. It brings the puppeteers close to the puppets, allowing more precise movements as well as literally breathing life into the inanimate. But while Bunraku utilizes detailed face painting and elaborate costumes, Handspring carved rough outlines of faces that allowed light to play on the surfaces, giving the audience the freedom to imagine an internal life. Where Bunraku seeks striking poses and bombastic movement, Handspring brought the everyday to life, lifting it to the mythical.

The company’s masterwork War Horse, produced by London’s National Theatre in 2007 and subsequently seen around the world, brought this form of puppet theater to a new height of expression. Its majestic horse sculptures coming to life using nothing but cane, silk, and leather, operated by a group of performers who vanished behind the mirage of a living horse, in many ways marked the culmination of an era in South African puppetry.

Fluid Boundaries: Janni Younge’s Artistic Journey

From the ranks of the Handspring Puppet Company emerged a new director and designer of puppetry, Janni Younge. While having learned a great deal from her apprenticeship with Handspring, she sought to push the boundaries of the art form, infusing it with a sense of fluidity and movement that breaks free from the chains of the body and enters the realm of spirit. Younge’s innovative approach to puppetry captures ephemeral concepts like time and change in deceptively simple material constructs. In her hands and the hands of her performers, materials like hessian, silk, or styrofoam come to embody the fabric of our lives, exploring the intricate threads that connect past, present, and future versions of ourselves to re-experience the melancholy and joy of existence.

A case in point is Younge’s previous production, in which she sought to bring Shakespeare’s Hamlet to life through puppetry. This was a highly personal journey for me as I played the verbose troubled lead, a role I never in my wildest dreams imagined to be associated with. Hamlet is a Dane. I can be many things on stage, but even I would think it a stretch to take on the appearance of a Scandinavian prince. More to the point, to say the Bard’s words was daunting enough; to bring the character to life as a puppet was to step into the unknown.

The puppets did not simply “speak” the words; they expressed visually the poetic dynamism of Shakespeare’s characters, unveiling the mythic in the tale. Through the puppets, Younge explored Hamlet’s psychology and existential questions by splitting the embodiment of the character between different puppeteers, amplifying the complexity of thought and feeling, and creating a multi-dimensional portrayal of Hamlet’s inner world. The material qualities of hessian and silk became the inspiration for revealing the play’s central themes: Hamlet’s madness whispering murder in his ear, Ophelia’s grief splitting her in two, the Ghost ebbing and flowing through every scene as vengeance incarnate.

“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! / Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!” To have a puppet ponder these thoughts and to hear Hamlet’s famous lines emanate from an inanimate object while the puppeteers strained to keep its reality alive for the audience—these moments are what make Younge’s use of the art of puppetry so compelling.

Kindred Spirits: Puppetry Meets Baroque Music Theater

In the ethereal realm of the arts, where transcendent emotions are translated into the real, music theater and puppetry stand as two profoundly distinct yet mysteriously kindred souls. Together, as in this production of Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, they become a celestial dance of music and movement that seeks to connect us to what is most fundamental in human life.

Music theater embraces the human voice as its paramount instrument to invoke the most profound emotions, its technical prowess and physical power resonating from the deepest chambers of our hearts. In puppetry, on the other hand, inanimate figures, as if by some divine incantation, become vessels for the unspoken. In the manipulation of the inanimate, the inexpressible stands before us. This is the common alchemy of the two art forms: they enthrall by transcending language and reaching for the sublime. They convey the inexpressible, drawing us into a world where passion, sacrifice, and redemption swirl like vivid dreams.

In this production, music theater and puppetry form a magical artistic union, revealing the multiplicity of human experience in the story of Aci, Galatea, and Polifemo and inviting us to witness the sublime in all its intricate layers. I am humbled by the creative journey we undertook to present this show, and proud to share it with Berlin audiences.

Mongiwekhaya is an award-winning actor, puppeteer, director, and writer. He has enjoyed a longstanding artistic partnership with director Janni Younge, most recently including his portrayal of the title role in Younge’s production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that premiered at the South Africa’s 2022 National Art Festival.