Christian Reiner is a speaker of poetry, prose and experimental texts. He works on radio plays, theatre projects, readings, concerts and CD recordings, both alone and in various formations. His work focuses primarily on the intermediate area between language and music.
Since the middle of the 1990s he has collaborated with improvisatory musicians and dancers, and developed his own ways of improvising with the spoken word and experimenting with the human voice’s possibilities. He presents his work at festivals, guest performances and concerts, but also in productions for young audiences. Since 1996 he has been a speaker for film, radio and television, and since 1999 he has performed in various theatre productions. He made his Salzburg Festival debut as the soloist in a concert performance of Beat Furrer’s Begehren with Klangforum Wien in 2018.
Christian Reiner was born in Munich in 1970, trained initially as a metalworker and from 1986 performed as a singer in various rock bands. Following classical singing training (with Bennie Gillette and others), he began studying phonetics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1994.
From 1996 to 1999 he studied speech art and speech education at the State University for Music and the Performing Arts in Stuttgart. There he experimented with combining the spoken word and music, performed in various ensembles, developed his first radio play and in 1999 received a scholarship from the Baden-Württemberg Arts Foundation.
In 2000 Christian Reiner moved to Berlin. He currently lives in Vienna.
