Sprechoper in Five Acts
FEED // a_social_opera
Conceived by Nicodemus and scripted by Stacy Dorgan Bentz, FEED, our first ever instant opera, is now out in paperback. Order your copy from your local bookshop or visit Amazon.de.
With this project, we aim to create an imagined world in word and sound that enables us to engage not only artistically and aesthetically, but also critically and ethically, with the increasing fragmentation and polarisation of society at a time of global crisis.
The work divides into five acts, each dominated by one of the opera’s characters, who address the climate emergency from radically different and isolated points of view. Its plotless narrative materialises via strings of loosely linked monologic echo chambers, dialogues variously disrupted by cancel culture chants, that fail at actual exchange.
Online, such texts (social media posts and comments) defy one’s intuitive assumptions about communication. We perceive them as reciprocal, shared experiences fixed in time and space. In FEED, each embodiment of these texts both enacts and exposes the fleeting, transient, algorithm-driven constructs that they in reality are.
Part theatre, part rave, FEED blurs the lines between performer and audience and in so doing allows us to explore at scale subjects as critical as the future of life on Earth, while simultaneously co-creating an immersive work of profound cathartic force.
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