About

Nice to meet you!

Elia Rediger – Artist, Director, Ritualist, Opera & Rock’n’Roll Realisateur.
Born in Kinshasa and raised between Swiss farmland, Denver skies, and the backrooms of theatres, Elia Rediger moves through the world as a musician, singer, performer, and director who turns stages into utopian laboratories. Known as the sonor voice of the ArtPop band The bianca Story, he blends rock’n’roll energy, opera-scale emotions, political imagination, and ritualistic performance into a language entirely his own.
Elia’s works are border-crossings: sometimes concert, sometimes ceremony, sometimes collective uprising. With projects like GROUP50:50, Int. Int. Irrit, and Caravan of LUV, he creates spaces where music becomes political action, spiritual practice, and shared transformation. His style—post-documentary, playful, radical—echoes cultural pioneers like Schlingensief while remaining unmistakably Rediger.

A child singer at Theater Basel and accidentally mentored by Schlingensief’s chaos, Elia followed a path from media art studies to founding The bianca Story, releasing four albums, and touring worldwide and stepping boldly onto theatre stages. In 2012 he even ran for mayor of Basel with the “first ever democratic songwriting sessions”, inventing a 104-author campaign anthem and shaking his hometown awake.
His creations often wrestle with biography, utopia, and the beautiful friction between them. Highlights include the LSD-Oratorium Oh Albert with the Basel Sinfonietta, the music-theatre piece Oh Boyoma and the mining oratorio Herkules von Lubumbashi with choreographer Dorine Mokha, which helped lay the foundation for GROUP50:50—an artistic model for equitable intercontinental collaboration.
In Berlin he co-founded the collective Brigade Futur 3 (nominated for the Deutscher Jazzpreis), and since 2019 he directed the late-night format Aus dem Hinterhalt: Macht der Künste at the Deutsche Oper. His practice spans opera, film, performance, and political art; he collaborates internationally and has worked closely with director Milo Rau on several projects from Das neue Evangelium to Antigone im Amazonas.
Today, Elia is developing different crossmedial opera formats, a song cycle, a touring ritual series, large-scale community ceremonies, and the upcoming Zweiflermesse OH FAITH (2026)—continuing his search for the point where music becomes movement, and performance becomes possibility. Rediger is Tonali Award Winner (2021) and his highly acclaimed work is shown in many international festivals.