Ersan Mondtag wins OPER! Award
Ersan Mondtag has been awarded a prestigious OPER! Award, alongside Annika Lu, for their costumes for Antikrist, which opened at Deutsche Oper Berlin on the 30 January 2022. He previously won an OPER! Award for Best Stage Designer in 2020, for Der Schmied von Gent.
The awards, made by OPER! magazine and chosen by a jury of specialist journalists, were presented last night at a ceremony in Dortmund. The jury’s citation read: ‘A colourful potpourri: that is recipe for many, though not all of Ersan Mondtag’s works. He is always best as his own stage and costume designer, sometimes assisted by a co-creative. In the case of the raw, essentially unplayable Antikrist by Rued Langgaard, that person was Annika Lu. At the Deutsche Oper Berlin this anticlerical musical pamphlet between apocalypse and rebirth unfolded into a triumph of imagination, a gaudy invocation of the expressive 1920s. Baffling but mesmerising: God as a monstrous naked puppet and the Great Whore of Babylon in a massive, hatching-patterned fat suit.’
Mondtag has won many awards, most recently the Prix du Syndicat professionnel de la critique Théâtre, Musique et Danse for Best European Co-production, for Weill's Der Silbersee and an International Opera Awards nomination for Rediscovered Work for Antikrist. Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg described the production as, ‘Completely crude, truly ingenious, and absolutely cutting edge.’
