O Fortuna – the wheel of fate turns unpredictably, lifting people up high only to hurl them into the abyss. But is everything really predestined? Choreographer and director Andreas Heise intertwines Leoncavallo’s »Pagliacci« – a story of jealousy, obsession and deadly violence – with Carl Orff’s archaic »Carmina Burana«. The clown wears a mask, but beneath the surface, tensions are brewing. Where song meets movement, fabric begins to fray – between appearance and reality, between art and raw violence.

Inspired by the aesthetics of silent film and the shadowy entertainment cultures of the 1920s and 30s, a world of the grotesque, the absurd and the frivolous emerges. Song, movement and music interpenetrate, merging into a kaleidoscopic image of those places where the mask begins to crumble. Artistic freedom tips into obsession, desire into violence, the game becomes deadly serious. What is performance, what is reality? Where does the pose end and where does naked emotion begin?

»O Fortuna« brings the opera ensemble and Leipzig Ballet together in an evening that asks: How much do we trust what we see – and what is actually still real here?