print | social media
MC MESSER – Hip Hop Opera
The challenge lay in creating a visual bridge between hip hop culture and so-called high culture within the context of the theater world and its audience.
The design approach was intentionally minimalist yet bold, with stylistic elements like graffiti-inspired tags in the program booklet paying homage to the aesthetics of hip hop.
MC MESSER
URBAN ARTS ENSEMBLE RUHR & Guests
Directed by Neco Çelik
Inspired by The Beggar’s Opera, the second production by the Urban Arts Ensemble Ruhr presents an extraordinary piece about societal constraints, empowerment, and hope.
John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, first performed in London in 1728, served as the basis for Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. With MC Messer, director Neco Çelik brings this material into the present—into a world where prejudiced narratives about migrants persist, and where issues like clan criminality, abuse of power, and absurd deportation policies dominate public discourse.
This new take becomes a mirror of our times, inviting reflection and sparking discussion.
The interdisciplinary team, composed of both established theater professionals and self-taught artists, lays the groundwork for a new quality of stage art.
By oscillating between the worlds of high culture and urban art, popular music and opera, dance theater and hip-hop, the production carves out a unique form destined to make its mark on the theater landscape.
Its social relevance, newly composed soundscapes, the powerful language of rap, unconventional staging, and the raw energy of the Urban Arts Ensemble Ruhr resonate with audiences beyond traditional theatergoers.
Crossing boundaries and provoking discomfort is both the intention and starting point of this entire work—it challenges the audience’s visual and mental habits, generates dramatic tension between characters, and exposes flawed mechanisms within the art world itself.
Director Neco Çelik has been staging plays, operas, and dance theater since 2006. His first opera production—Gegen die Wand by Ludger Vollmer, based on Fatih Akin’s film of the same name—premiered in 2011 at the Young Opera Stuttgart and was honored with the German Theatre Award Faust in the category of musical theater.
