6 November 2009 - Statement performed by Paul Oomen at the opening of Operation Musictheatre - a series of debates on the future of the genre. 397 words.
MAIN TEXT
Opera is the art of synesthesia. It is an art situated in between the various regions of the mind. It is an art created by words, sounds and pictures merged into an illusionary perception, beyond the limits of the individual senses.
This is what makes opera interdisciplinary: it does not stand alone, it exists between the disciplines. In our mediated society, opera can function as an interdisciplinary laboratory for innovation and become a meeting place for cooperation between countless areas of expertise. I see a great future for this artistic form of connectedness in our society.
To opera composers, the challenge will not only be to create their own artistic world, but to do so in proper relation to reality. Not the individual, but rather the communal has to be reinvented in the arts: with each new creation, we have to wonder how we are related to the world around us.
Fifteen years from now, in 2024, opera as a genre will no longer exist: by then, the now still existent stable circuit of current opera, with its own audience, theatres and its more or less clear artistic framework will have disappeared entirely. Opera will explode from its framework and show itself in an entire palette of appearances.
On the internet, we will create opera between the here and there, the then and now, the constant and the transient. A data stream connects the stories and sounds of musicians from all over the world. It is a musical theater of intercultural meetings that take place between everywhere and nowhere.
We will design virtual spaces for interactive games in which the players can move freely between scenes in sound, light and words. The player himself becomes the hero of an opera he co-creates. An audience at once becomes spectator of and performer for others in a performance that reinvents itself in each new moment.
During the New Year’s celebration on Dam Square in Amsterdam, surrounded by the ecstatic sounds of house music hundreds of opera singers will mix with the crowd, where they vocalize their arias like angels: pushing, hanging, dancing and floating among the people.
And in the theatres, people come to rest. In the haven of red velvet we listen to the sounds of an aria from ‘La Traviata’ gently fading away…
Paul Oomen 2009 English translation by Sara Zorandy
No comments:
Post a Comment