ITI  Music Theatre Committee

Comité du Théâtre Lyrique de l'IIT  

 2006 - 2008

31st ITI World Congress 2006 - 32nd ITI World Congress 2008 
31ème Congrès mondial de l'IIT 2006 - 32ème Congrès mondial de l'IIT 2008

President / Président:                       Roland QUITT (Germany/Allemagne)  Roland QUITT
Vice-President / Vice-Président :   Liaquat Ali LUCKY (Bangladesh)
Secretary / Secrétaire :                    Laura BERMAN (Germany/Allemagne)  Laura BERMAN
                                                                 Nancy RHODES (USA / E.U.)

Laura Berman and Roland Quitt will exchange their positions of President and Secretary in one year’s time (May 25, 2007).
Laura Berman et Roland Quitt échangeront leurs mandats de Président et de Secrétaire au terme d'une année  d'activité (25 mai 2007)

Mission Statement - Music Theatre Committee of the ITI 

 Within the ITI, the Music Theatre Committee (MTC) functions as a forum for question and task development concerning music theatre. Its work focuses on problems related to the support and the advocacy of present music theatre forms in the context of traditional and new works as well. The MTC was founded in 1969 based on the initiative Walter Felsenstein, who also remained the Committee’s president until his death in 1975.

 While the cultural exchange between the countries of the Eastern and the Western Bloc used to be a major task of the ITI – until 1989, the office of president and co-president was filled by a theatre representative from a NATO and a Warsaw-Pact state accordingly – the end of the cold war made it necessary also for the MTC to redefine its tasks:

 1. Since the MTC’s inauguration, new relations of text, music and stage action have evolved next to the traditional ‘opera form’. The former separation between a work’s autonomous score and its interpretation through the actors and the production team is often abandoned. In many instances, the traditional separation of tasks (composer, writer, director, set designer, executing musicians and singers) has fallen away. In fact, modern music theatre gains special relevance as a melting pot utilizing many aspects of hybrid arts and post dramatic theatre.

 The MTC’s present tasks include dealing with the above-mentioned tendencies as well as with the resulting difficulties on an institutional level. For several reasons it is difficult for traditional music theatre institutions to keep up to date with the development of the art form. As a result, new music theatre is becoming more and more removed from the stages of opera houses but is produced independently, partly with a considerable lack of structural support. Different countries of course show different approaches in dealing with this problem.

 2. While its work used to be based on music theatre forms with a European origin, the MTC is currently looking to encompass those coming from a non-European background. To what extend a single committee will be able to handle those highly differentiated forms and cultural backgrounds remains for the future to show. For now, it is about  giving  a voice to the said forms of music theatre.

 Since the end of Hellmuth Matiasek’s presidency in 2005, the MTC has found itself in a state of restructuring, which also includes its reorganization of relevant representatives of current music theatre. At the moment one of its major projects consists in organizing the international meeting “Music Theatre Now” (the successor of the former “International Music Theatre Workshop”).

Further information on "Music Theatre Now": www.iti-germany.de/musictheatrenow