The Combat

The Combat is a music-theater production exploring the tensions between past and present, religion and science, the analog and digital. Presented in two parts, it weaves together Claudio Monteverdi’s dramatic madrigal “Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda” (1624) with Mathias Monrad Møller’s ‘musicle’ “Boring Orbits” (2020). In Monteverdi’s gripping erotic tale, religious ideology tragically thwarts love when the Christian knight Tancredi mistakenly kills his beloved Clorinda, a Saracen, in battle. After he recognizes her, in her last moments, he baptizes her, leading her to whisper the poignant final words, “The heavens open, I go in peace.” These words echo as the audience is transported from the brutality of the Crusades to the weightlessness of space. The second half, “Boring Orbits”, introduces a modern-day crusader: an astronaut, suspended in the stillness of a space station, observing Earth’s divisions—between longing and disdain, survival and destruction. From his lofty vantage point, he fields calls from presidents, popes, and movie stars while wrestling with humanity’s existential dilemmas. “Boring Orbits” depicts the alienation from Earth as an alienation from the self, drawing inspiration from a wide range of texts by, among others, Gottfried Benn, Elon Musk and real astronauts. Blending Monteverdi’s evocative baroque battle music with contemporary voice-synthesizers, “The Combat” creates a hybrid musical form. Performed by tenor Mathias Monrad Møller alongside a baroque ensemble led by Yngvild Haaland Ruud, the striking choreography by Alma Toaspern explores how far physical strain and tension can be explored for expressive needs, while at the same time singing opera.