A wood in summer is a place of longing, where dreams come true and the promise is of freedom from the strictures of civilisation. Shakespeare’s wood in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM is located just seven miles from town, but in our globalised age we find places of longing and ravaged regions of the 3rd world existing side-by-side, just a few hours by plane from our own home. Sometimes the difference between photos from a safari brochure and the photos in a war correspondent’s article is only a matter of perspective. Which is why our place of yearning, where other rules apply, voodoo holds sway and we seek the answer to our complicated 1st world problems in a return to – or grand overturning of – its more archaic living conditions, is probably located on the equator after all, rather than just down the street. More precisely, in the lovely continent that is Africa.

In the Ambushed version of the Dream this is where the craftsmen live. After all, someone has to do all the hard, manual labour to make midsummer night dreams possible in the first place. If it weren’t for raw materials, there’d be no holiday snaps, let alone smartphones to view them on. Cue for the craftsmen of Brigade Futur 3 and their singer, Ambushed curator Elia Rediger, to turn Shakespeare’s A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM and Benjamin Britten’s opera version of it around, focusing not on the dreaminess of the mind but the down-to-earth-ness of the feet, and pledging to shake things up in the course of that never-ending summer.

Brigade Futur 3 will be joined by singers of the Deutsche Oper Berlin ensemble and also a special guest, singer and producer BONAPARTE, whose current album “Was Mir Passiert” was recorded in Abidjan and mixes the political with the private. Workers and artists unite in a one-of-a-kind summer-night festival, an open invitation to explore without inhibition some highly complex current issues.

This is the second AMBUSHED edition of the 2019/2020 season. It poses the question: why the title POWER OF THE ARTS? What kind of power are we talking about? What can it bring about? Who might be affected by it? This is the big theme being addressed by singer, composer and director Elia Rediger, who has been curating the series since the start of the 2019/2020 season. The successful AMBUSHED FROM BEHIND series continues its work offering an alternative response to five operas receiving their premieres on the main stage.