Collective performance operas are complexly layered collaborative live performance works that we create through medium to long-term artist-in-residence programs. These programs consist of intensive co-creation processes where the artist duo operates in teamwork with the interdisciplinary artists and performers we invite to produce the opera, which, hence, is based on the unique contribution and vision that each of them brings into it. A collective performance opera is, therefore, the result of a shared, artistic itinerary in the space where it takes place—the laboratory to play out new challenges co-operatively.
As it was for the alchemists engaging in their philosophical quest, a collective performance opera, likewise the co-creative process that shapes it, is for those who trust in change. It springs from scanning into the flesh of dream matter to search for spaces of hidden beauty—the fragments of our violated landscapes that stagnate inside and outside the Self to give it a new trajectory, a face, a luminous form.
A performance opera addresses the overstretched global body searching for a home or that has embarked on a pilgrimage with no end. On the one hand, it is a collective gathering to dance on the margins hand in hand, perform, leave imperceptible traces, and take action because each of us has unique stories to tell. On the other hand, it is a nomadism aiming to structure temporary autonomous zones of co-creation to empower one’s art and openness moving through generative inquiry, thus letting collective imageries and counter-imageries flow and fuse into one another after having clashed and collided so far.
Also, a performance opera is for those to whom the surreal is familiar—visionary poets, artists and performers driven by the urgency to reconcile with the mystery where all things coexist, for anything that remains alone is just nothing per se. It is for those whose journey through visible and invisible places is ceaseless; for those who listen, seek to express and not to impress, understanding that the concept of success is now surpassed. Eventually, it is for those who take risks to seek new live images, dynamic and transient as they may be.
Our definition of ‘performance opera’ stems from the etymon of the terms ’performance’ and ‘opera’. The term ’performance’ derives from the verb perform (c. 1300), meaning: ‘to carry into effect, fulfil, discharge’, via Anglo-French performer, altered (by the influence of Old French forme ‘form,’ from Latin forma) from Old French parfornir ‘to do, carry out, finish, accomplish’ from par- ‘completely’ (see per-) + fornir ‘to provide’ (see furnish).
The Latin preposition per- indicates ‘passing through a space and extending or spreading over and around.’ As a prefix to a word, it functions as a superlative, complement or continuation.
The Latin noun forma origins from the Greek phorēsis, ‘the act of carrying’, from phorein, ‘to carry, wear’, frequentative of pherein, ‘the action to bring’, in the same way that it means ‘bearing’, ‘posture’ and seemingly ‘aspect’, ‘resemblance’ and ‘image’.
The Latin for-ma also connects to the Sanskrit root -dhar, which means ‘holding, supporting, containing’, and desinence Sanskrit ma. Dharma means ‘stationary, fixed’ (in Hinduism, the eternal law of the cosmos, inherent in the very nature of things). However, for-ma is a term that responds to the Sanskrit term dhar-i-man, meaning ‘form, shape, figure and image’, and also ‘the choice and the way to dispose of a matter, whatever it is, in the human labour.’ Therefore, according to the etymological derivations, the meaning of the word ‘performance’ can be said to be ‘acting in support of the image.’
The Latin noun opera means ‘labour, work.’ It also implies the idea of opus in alchemy. In XVII century Italy, opera was defined as ‘the labour that a person accomplishes in a day’, referring only to ‘manual labour’, and later to ethical and moral action and intellectual, artistic and scientific labour. Io opero (literally, ‘I operate’ or ‘I work’) is a more refined Italian expression than the simple io lavoro, ‘I work’. Eventually, according to the etymological definition of the two terms, ‘performance opera’ can mean ‘a work that functions in support of the image’.
Still, with the expression ‘performance opera’, we do not intend to define performances mainly choreographed or structured a priori in every part. For us, a performance opera should always remain open to the unpredictability of the process, even though methodologically well-organized. When we perform, we create live images, producing meanings.
Our view of performance as an artistic practice is based on the idea that life is an inclusive space to demolish prejudices of all kinds. We perform collaboratively to state that a person is truly free when they recognize that all other people are free as well, echoing the Russian anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin, who wrote in his unfinished manuscript (published posthumously in 1882) God and the State, “Every enslavement of men is, at the same time, a limit on my own freedom. I am a free man only so far as I recognize the humanity and liberty of all men around me. In respecting their humanity, I respect my own” (1970, xi).
We perform with our performance collective — artist friends — to relate to each other using the performative space to identify a chance to enable us and the audience to do something we could not previously imagine, whose contours are freedom, liberty, empowerment, and love, at last. Thus, we attempt to promote a eutopian gaze and a protopic attitude towards reality by performing.
Eutopia means “good place”, from Greek: εὖ, ‘good’ or ‘well’, and τόπος, ‘place’. Protopia is a term coined by Kevin Kelly (2011), founder and executive director of Wired magazine. It clusters the idea of a better future and, therefore, visions of possible, attainable, alternative realities, not that they cannot exist or are static. It is an idea that underscores places where human society comprises people who are not in constant conflict but invite each other to feel free to confront their capacity for transformation, male, female, trans, or anything else. These are places where people can unblock themselves from the impasse caused by recurring patterns of suffering and where everyone can actively work for the well-being of others.
From this perspective, our performance operas can be read as dreams of social transformation. They do not state that everything will suit everyone or that, conversely, a crisis is irreversible. They focus on possibility as a shared fact to move in mutually desirable directions where everyone’s freedom can increase exponentially. However, like dreams, which are fleeting and unrepeatable, each of our performance operas is presented publicly only once.
Conceptually, we conceive our performance operas driving inspiration from what Theodor Adorno says about Gustav Mahler’s music—quarrelling against reality, sometimes imitating it, but that becomes protest in the moments it breaks through it. For Adorno, Mahler’s music never mends the fracture between the subject and the object. Still, rather than pretending a conciliation, it prefers to shatter itself into pieces: “The prevailing ideology of the true, beautiful, and good, with which Mahler’s music first made common cause, is inverted into valid protest” (Adorno, 1992, p. 46).
For Mahler, the protest is self-conscious—a self-aware poetic act of resistance and revolt, as later André Gide unfolds in his Poétique (1949) and Albert Camus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1979). The aesthetic rupture that a performance opera lets emerge originates from beyond the performers’ intrinsic actions. It seems to intervene from the outside but is also latent in the content of the performance opera itself.
Indeed, we perform collaboratively as an artist duo and with our performance collective to tell about human struggles. Indeed, for us, ‘performance’ is the restless movement an artist accomplishes to stay alive and find an existential way out. From this stance, any attempt to square the word ‘performance’ through general definitions is nothing but the straitjacket of that scientific ratio, which has already reduced nature to the simple object of exploitation.
In a performance opera, if one knows how to do something skillfully, they may realize that it can become something else when they venture out of their comfort zone to aside their performance companions. Consequently, performance operas are undoubtedly hybrid works, but for this very reason, they liberate the performers as they do not submit to classically understood artistic canons. On the contrary, they challenge them.
Hence, a performance opera inevitably includes aesthetic errors and ruptures, not only because the different performance techniques that concur to create it sometimes do not harmonize with each other but also because the performers voluntarily de-disciplined their performative languages and styles by contaminating them.
We understand these errors and ruptures as diversified phenomena that similarly pervade many areas of daily life. In the co-creation processes, we take on errors and ruptures by going beyond their destructive element. We welcome them as opportunities to penetrate the configuration of reality, things, and systems, explore their mechanisms from different perspectives, and translate them into performance.
For example, the performance operas After the Fear (2017), Anam Cara—Dwelling Bodies (2018), and UnderScars (2022) unfolded as they built on sustained encounters of different artistic research and performance practices: performance art, vocal performance, dance, and experiential music. On these occasions, we gather with our performance collective to unveil unconventionally precious experiences of vulnerabilities, hesitations, fragilities, hopes, and the unspoken we carry under our scars, which we try to heal by performing. We blended our performance practices to communicate to the audience that forging a sense of community and collective care among people is essential to responding to present crises effectively.
VestAndPage. (2017). After the Fear. KPGT, Belgrade (SRB). Photograph by Mina Sarenac. In the image, Verena Stenke.
We recounted our memories because we could not forget or hide what we had passed through. We made them strike to the point of rupture, eventually deploying them as experiential, transformative matters to respond poetically to today’s emergencies with passion, enthusiasm, and hope—for to lose hope in the time we are living cannot be an option.
VestAndPage and the Anam Cara Collective. (2018). Anam Cara – Dwelling Bodies. ECC, Palazzo Mora, Venice (IT). Photograph by Lorenza Cini. In the image, Sara Simeoni and Verena Stenke.
VestAndPage and the Anam Cara Collective. (2022). UnderScars. ECC, Palazzo Mora, Venice (IT). Photograph by Lorenza Cini. In the image, Enok Ripley is hand-poking Andrea Pagnes’s skin.
To produce a performance opera, we usually transform the space where we present it (i.e. an old decaying factory in disuse or a Renaissance palazzo) into a dwelling site of interconnected performance installations. We migrate towards each other to find and draw from a common origin—our bodies engaging in acts of recognition and belonging, cutting across the normative and ossified categories of thought. We set free from constraint to foster companionship because an absolute “I” is unthinkable, for the “I” is social.
When a collective of artists, musicians and performers gather in the same performance space to share their sensory perception of reality and live it as a felt mutual understanding, the mirror of Narcissus falls into pieces: individual selves become relational and call for the collective, having no more reason to determine their singularity.
In so doing, a performance opera is not a representation but an open space where visions become like threads that intersect with one another in an interweaving of lived experiences, destinies, and auto-ethnographies performed without a preconceived design. The audience is invited to be part of an empirical fabric tailored by performance actions, consisting of a performatic crossover of systems and patterns in an ever-changing reconfiguration of the notion of coexistence. We tackle themes such as abuse, discrimination, patriarchy, capitalism, disability, severe diseases, and addiction through time-based interactions and rituals of kinship and togetherness that follow a non-linear narrative. Eventually, our stories blur and harbour into one, castling under the weft of ephemeral scenic compositions woven of existential paths.
VestAndPage and the Anam Cara Collective. (2022). UnderScars. Photograph by Alexander Harbaugh. In the image, performance ensemble/tableaux vivant.
***
REFERENCES (in order of citation)
Bakunin, M. (1970). God and the State. Dover.
Adorno, T. (1996). Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy. University of Chicago Press.
Gide, A. (1949). “Poétique.” In: Anthologie de la poésie française. Par André Gide. Gallimard.
Camus, A. (1979). The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Penguin.
INSIGHTS
- For VestAndPage’s performance operas, see:
UnderScars: https://veniceperformancAeart.org/the-art-week/under-scars-2022
Anam Cara-Dwelling Bodies: https://veniceperformanceart.org/the-art-week/body-matters-anam-cara-2018
After the Fear: https://www.vest-and-page.de/home-cycle-2017 (scroll down)
- For performance operas poetic accounts, see:
disley, d. (2018) Dissecting Anam Cara: In between the senses, togetherness and the quantum. https://veniceperformanceart.org/the-art-week/body-matters-anam-cara-2018/dissecting-anam-cara
McNaughton, A. (2019). Dear Anam Cara. https://veniceperformanceart.org/the-art-week/body-matters-anam-cara-2018/dear-anam-cara
Gareffa, M. (2023). U̷n̷d̷e̷r̷ ̷S̷c̷a̷r̷s̷ A poetic witness. https://veniceperformanceart.org/the-art-week/under-scars-2022/poetic-witness
*
Collective performance operas are complexly layered collaborative live performance works that we create through medium to long-term artist-in-residence programs. These programs consist of intensive co-creation processes where the artist duo operates in teamwork with the interdisciplinary artists and performers we invite to produce the opera, which, hence, is based on the unique contribution and vision that each of them brings into it. A collective performance opera is, therefore, the result of a shared, artistic itinerary in the space where it takes place—the laboratory to play out new challenges co-operatively.
As it was for the alchemists engaging in their philosophical quest, a collective performance opera, likewise the co-creative process that shapes it, is for those who trust in change. It springs from scanning into the flesh of dream matter to search for spaces of hidden beauty—the fragments of our violated landscapes that stagnate inside and outside the Self to give it a new trajectory, a face, a luminous form.
A performance opera addresses the overstretched global body searching for a home or that has embarked on a pilgrimage with no end. On the one hand, it is a collective gathering to dance on the margins hand in hand, perform, leave imperceptible traces, and take action because each of us has unique stories to tell. On the other hand, it is a nomadism aiming to structure temporary autonomous zones of co-creation to empower one’s art and openness moving through generative inquiry, thus letting collective imageries and counter-imageries flow and fuse into one another after having clashed and collided so far.
Also, a performance opera is for those to whom the surreal is familiar—visionary poets, artists and performers driven by the urgency to reconcile with the mystery where all things coexist, for anything that remains alone is just nothing per se. It is for those whose journey through visible and invisible places is ceaseless; for those who listen, seek to express and not to impress, understanding that the concept of success is now surpassed. Eventually, it is for those who take risks to seek new live images, dynamic and transient as they may be.
Our definition of ‘performance opera’ stems from the etymon of the terms ’performance’ and ‘opera’. The term ’performance’ derives from the verb perform (c. 1300), meaning: ‘to carry into effect, fulfil, discharge’, via Anglo-French performer, altered (by the influence of Old French forme ‘form,’ from Latin forma) from Old French parfornir ‘to do, carry out, finish, accomplish’ from par- ‘completely’ (see per-) + fornir ‘to provide’ (see furnish).
The Latin preposition per- indicates ‘passing through a space and extending or spreading over and around.’ As a prefix to a word, it functions as a superlative, complement or continuation.
The Latin noun forma origins from the Greek phorēsis, ‘the act of carrying’, from phorein, ‘to carry, wear’, frequentative of pherein, ‘the action to bring’, in the same way that it means ‘bearing’, ‘posture’ and seemingly ‘aspect’, ‘resemblance’ and ‘image’.
The Latin for-ma also connects to the Sanskrit root -dhar, which means ‘holding, supporting, containing’, and desinence Sanskrit ma. Dharma means ‘stationary, fixed’ (in Hinduism, the eternal law of the cosmos, inherent in the very nature of things). However, for-ma is a term that responds to the Sanskrit term dhar-i-man, meaning ‘form, shape, figure and image’, and also ‘the choice and the way to dispose of a matter, whatever it is, in the human labour.’ Therefore, according to the etymological derivations, the meaning of the word ‘performance’ can be said to be ‘acting in support of the image.’
The Latin noun opera means ‘labour, work.’ It also implies the idea of opus in alchemy. In XVII century Italy, opera was defined as ‘the labour that a person accomplishes in a day’, referring only to ‘manual labour’, and later to ethical and moral action and intellectual, artistic and scientific labour. Io opero (literally, ‘I operate’ or ‘I work’) is a more refined Italian expression than the simple io lavoro, ‘I work’. Eventually, according to the etymological definition of the two terms, ‘performance opera’ can mean ‘a work that functions in support of the image’.
Still, with the expression ‘performance opera’, we do not intend to define performances mainly choreographed or structured a priori in every part. For us, a performance opera should always remain open to the unpredictability of the process, even though methodologically well-organized. When we perform, we create live images, producing meanings.
Our view of performance as an artistic practice is based on the idea that life is an inclusive space to demolish prejudices of all kinds. We perform collaboratively to state that a person is truly free when they recognize that all other people are free as well, echoing the Russian anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin, who wrote in his unfinished manuscript (published posthumously in 1882) God and the State, “Every enslavement of men is, at the same time, a limit on my own freedom. I am a free man only so far as I recognize the humanity and liberty of all men around me. In respecting their humanity, I respect my own” (1970, xi).
We perform with our performance collective — artist friends — to relate to each other using the performative space to identify a chance to enable us and the audience to do something we could not previously imagine, whose contours are freedom, liberty, empowerment, and love, at last. Thus, we attempt to promote a eutopian gaze and a protopic attitude towards reality by performing.
Eutopia means “good place”, from Greek: εὖ, ‘good’ or ‘well’, and τόπος, ‘place’. Protopia is a term coined by Kevin Kelly (2011), founder and executive director of Wired magazine. It clusters the idea of a better future and, therefore, visions of possible, attainable, alternative realities, not that they cannot exist or are static. It is an idea that underscores places where human society comprises people who are not in constant conflict but invite each other to feel free to confront their capacity for transformation, male, female, trans, or anything else. These are places where people can unblock themselves from the impasse caused by recurring patterns of suffering and where everyone can actively work for the well-being of others.
From this perspective, our performance operas can be read as dreams of social transformation. They do not state that everything will suit everyone or that, conversely, a crisis is irreversible. They focus on possibility as a shared fact to move in mutually desirable directions where everyone’s freedom can increase exponentially. However, like dreams, which are fleeting and unrepeatable, each of our performance operas is presented publicly only once.
Conceptually, we conceive our performance operas driving inspiration from what Theodor Adorno says about Gustav Mahler’s music—quarrelling against reality, sometimes imitating it, but that becomes protest in the moments it breaks through it. For Adorno, Mahler’s music never mends the fracture between the subject and the object. Still, rather than pretending a conciliation, it prefers to shatter itself into pieces: “The prevailing ideology of the true, beautiful, and good, with which Mahler’s music first made common cause, is inverted into valid protest” (Adorno, 1992, p. 46).
For Mahler, the protest is self-conscious—a self-aware poetic act of resistance and revolt, as later André Gide unfolds in his Poétique (1949) and Albert Camus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1979). The aesthetic rupture that a performance opera lets emerge originates from beyond the performers’ intrinsic actions. It seems to intervene from the outside but is also latent in the content of the performance opera itself.
Indeed, we perform collaboratively as an artist duo and with our performance collective to tell about human struggles. Indeed, for us, ‘performance’ is the restless movement an artist accomplishes to stay alive and find an existential way out. From this stance, any attempt to square the word ‘performance’ through general definitions is nothing but the straitjacket of that scientific ratio, which has already reduced nature to the simple object of exploitation.
In a performance opera, if one knows how to do something skillfully, they may realize that it can become something else when they venture out of their comfort zone to aside their performance companions. Consequently, performance operas are undoubtedly hybrid works, but for this very reason, they liberate the performers as they do not submit to classically understood artistic canons. On the contrary, they challenge them.
Hence, a performance opera inevitably includes aesthetic errors and ruptures, not only because the different performance techniques that concur to create it sometimes do not harmonize with each other but also because the performers voluntarily de-disciplined their performative languages and styles by contaminating them.
We understand these errors and ruptures as diversified phenomena that similarly pervade many areas of daily life. In the co-creation processes, we take on errors and ruptures by going beyond their destructive element. We welcome them as opportunities to penetrate the configuration of reality, things, and systems, explore their mechanisms from different perspectives, and translate them into performance.
For example, the performance operas After the Fear (2017), Anam Cara—Dwelling Bodies (2018), and UnderScars (2022) unfolded as they built on sustained encounters of different artistic research and performance practices: performance art, vocal performance, dance, and experiential music. On these occasions, we gather with our performance collective to unveil unconventionally precious experiences of vulnerabilities, hesitations, fragilities, hopes, and the unspoken we carry under our scars, which we try to heal by performing. We blended our performance practices to communicate to the audience that forging a sense of community and collective care among people is essential to responding to present crises effectively.
VestAndPage. (2017). After the Fear. KPGT, Belgrade (SRB). Photograph by Mina Sarenac. In the image, Verena Stenke.
We recounted our memories because we could not forget or hide what we had passed through. We made them strike to the point of rupture, eventually deploying them as experiential, transformative matters to respond poetically to today’s emergencies with passion, enthusiasm, and hope—for to lose hope in the time we are living cannot be an option.
VestAndPage and the Anam Cara Collective. (2018). Anam Cara – Dwelling Bodies. ECC, Palazzo Mora, Venice (IT). Photograph by Lorenza Cini. In the image, Sara Simeoni and Verena Stenke.
VestAndPage and the Anam Cara Collective. (2022). UnderScars. ECC, Palazzo Mora, Venice (IT). Photograph by Lorenza Cini. In the image, Enok Ripley is hand-poking Andrea Pagnes’s skin.
To produce a performance opera, we usually transform the space where we present it (i.e. an old decaying factory in disuse or a Renaissance palazzo) into a dwelling site of interconnected performance installations. We migrate towards each other to find and draw from a common origin—our bodies engaging in acts of recognition and belonging, cutting across the normative and ossified categories of thought. We set free from constraint to foster companionship because an absolute “I” is unthinkable, for the “I” is social.
When a collective of artists, musicians and performers gather in the same performance space to share their sensory perception of reality and live it as a felt mutual understanding, the mirror of Narcissus falls into pieces: individual selves become relational and call for the collective, having no more reason to determine their singularity.
In so doing, a performance opera is not a representation but an open space where visions become like threads that intersect with one another in an interweaving of lived experiences, destinies, and auto-ethnographies performed without a preconceived design. The audience is invited to be part of an empirical fabric tailored by performance actions, consisting of a performatic crossover of systems and patterns in an ever-changing reconfiguration of the notion of coexistence. We tackle themes such as abuse, discrimination, patriarchy, capitalism, disability, severe diseases, and addiction through time-based interactions and rituals of kinship and togetherness that follow a non-linear narrative. Eventually, our stories blur and harbour into one, castling under the weft of ephemeral scenic compositions woven of existential paths.
VestAndPage and the Anam Cara Collective. (2022). UnderScars. Photograph by Alexander Harbaugh. In the image, performance ensemble/tableaux vivant.
***
REFERENCES (in order of citation)
Bakunin, M. (1970). God and the State. Dover.
Adorno, T. (1996). Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy. University of Chicago Press.
Gide, A. (1949). “Poétique.” In: Anthologie de la poésie française. Par André Gide. Gallimard.
Camus, A. (1979). The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Penguin.
INSIGHTS
- For VestAndPage’s performance operas, see:
UnderScars: https://veniceperformancAeart.org/the-art-week/under-scars-2022
Anam Cara-Dwelling Bodies: https://veniceperformanceart.org/the-art-week/body-matters-anam-cara-2018
After the Fear: https://www.vest-and-page.de/home-cycle-2017 (scroll down)
- For performance operas poetic accounts, see:
Disley, d. (2018) Dissecting Anam Cara: In between the senses, togetherness and the quantum. https://veniceperformanceart.org/the-art-week/body-matters-anam-cara-2018/dissecting-anam-cara
McNaughton, A. (2019). Dear Anam Cara. https://veniceperformanceart.org/the-art-week/body-matters-anam-cara-2018/dear-anam-cara
Gareffa, M. (2023). U̷n̷d̷e̷r̷ ̷S̷c̷a̷r̷s̷ A poetic witness. https://veniceperformanceart.org/the-art-week/under-scars-2022/poetic-witness