Elia Rediger

Elia Rediger was born in Kinshasa, Congo. The son of Swiss aid workers, he grew up in Basel after returning to Switzerland. At the age of ten, he sang for Christoph Schlingensief in the children's choir, which Rediger describes as his greatest theatre experience to date. After living in Denver, USA, and studying media and applied arts, he was the frontman and lyricist of the successful pop group The Bianca Story. In his work as a director at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, in-house author at the Bern Theatre and founder of the European-African theatre company GROUP50:50 (The Ghosts Are Returning, Faust Prize 2023), he develops formats that combine opera, film, theatre and visual arts in multimedia performances. An essential element of Rediger's creative work is the exploration of the possibilities and limits of the concert as a medium and means of communication, for example in his LSD oratorio Oh Albert or the Cobalt mine oratorio Hercule von Lubumbashi. Through the permanent deconstruction of narratives, the questioning of the audience's fixed habits and the reinterpreted use of new media, Rediger creates a charming language of stage performance, based on archaic narrative forms, digital technologies and hypernarrative structures. His work as a director, realiser, composer, lyricist and multimedia artist has brought him to the most renowned festivals. A long-standing collaboration connects Elia Rediger and Milo Rau in works such as the New Gospel, Antigone in the Amazon, Medea’s Kinderen and Grief & Beauty.