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May 2024 – June 2024

In cooperation with the Collectif barbare, the participatory music theatre project «L’Invitation» brought together people of different backgrounds, ages, genders and life experiences to gain stage experience and discover new music.

Between May and June 2024, intensive rehearsals were held at the Quartiertreffpunkt Hirzbrunnen and at the Gare du Nord, where participants experimented with self-built synthesizers. Gare du Nord, located in the border station Badischer Bahnhof Basel, provided an ideal stage for this intercultural project. The theatre became a place to encounter the foreign. A multi-layered acoustic and visual journey was staged in the middle of the audience.

February 2024 – April 2024

The «Guided Concert Tours» of the NOB composition workshop are a cooperation project between the New Orchestra Basel, the Open House Basel architecture festival and Gare du Nord, the station for new music. Pupils from two primary school classes in Basel composed their own musical pieces under professional guidance and performed them themselves. The starting point for the compositions were the rooms of the Gare du Nord, their use, their architectural and acoustic characteristics and their past. The pieces were performed as part of several concert tours through the spaces of the Gare du Nord during Open House Basel 2024. In addition, there were social perspectives and architectural-historical impulses on the building. The artistic aim was to allow old and new stories to enter into dialogue from the perspective of different disciplines and to make the hidden resonate.

2022 – 2023

The idea of a research residency for young music theatre professionals was born during the pandemic. The sudden and drastic restrictions on international exchange, guest performances and collaborations led to the plan to give one artist at a time the opportunity to come to Switzerland for a month in order to build up a professional network during this time. During their stay, the Atélier Mondial Basel acted as host and took care of the welcome, day-to-day concerns and administration. As Gare du Nord, we were responsible for connecting the artists with members of the Swiss music theatre network in Basel, Zurich, Geneva, Bern and Lucerne. This resulted in encounters with representatives of the music academies, the Basel theatre and various ensembles dedicated to contemporary music theatre.

The project aimed to provide the participants with an extensive network of contacts that could form the basis for international collaborations in the long term. The artists had free access to all performances and concerts at the Gare du Nord and also received a general season ticket for the whole of Switzerland. This enabled them to attend productions and festivals outside of Basel and gain a comprehensive insight into the Swiss music theatre scene.

The Basle-based amateur choirs bâlcanto, ATempo and Kultur und Volk got together with the Swiss voice performers Jeannine Hirzel, Isa Wiss, Andreas Schaerer and Christian Zehnder and followed their journey from the Kunstmuseum Basel through town to the Gare du Nord. They were inspired by the exhibition «Basel Short Stories. Von Erasmus bis Iris von Roten» at the Kunstmuseum Basel and devised musical improvisations of their favorite exhibition themes. The results were pinned in images of music and finally were presented as premieres at the Gare du Nord.