Musiktheaterkollektiv Hauen & Stechen: Ignorance is Bliss

Ignorance is Bliss is an opera parcours in complete cluelessness, full of the pitfalls of knowledge and the temptations of ignorance. What can we know, and what would we rather never have learned?


The scenario: Berlin’s theaters fall victim to the Senate’s budget cuts and are transformed into luxurious condominiums. In the Sophiensæle Festsaal, real estate agents and interior designers bustle about, extolling the virtues of exclusive rooms where Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht once spoke. Only one resists: a scientist whose life’s work – a time machine – is threatened by this sellout, and who refuses to leave. During the eviction, a struggle ensues, accidentally activating the machine and opening a time portal.


With Ignorance is Bliss, Hauen & Stechen travel back in time: a historical dictator and his entourage wreak havoc in Berlin-Mitte, while the theater’s janitor is taking up the usurper’s throne in past times. The incoherences of the present and the secrets of the past soon blow up in everyone’s faces.


In this music-theater comedy, the longing for knowledge collides with alternative forms of knowing and the thin line between knowledge and power. Hauen & Stechen defy propaganda and dig their way through escapist dreams and anachronistic fantasies.



(German, English, Ukrainian)