Space®opera 3.0
Space®opera is an original participatory format, artistic and educational in equal measure. It is also remarkably capacious. From the first activity to the last, it is created collectively by children, young people, teachers, curators and artists. For a limited period—whether over several months or anything from a few to a dozen or so weeks—it brings into being a creative collective whose members contribute different skills. This collective fulfils an educational role: through direct participation in creative processes, children and young people learn not only what contemporary music and art are, but also how to cooperate and develop other essential capabilities, creativity among them. Adults, in turn, learn the language of children and young people and discover what they genuinely need in order to express themselves, artistically and otherwise. The collective also fulfils artistic and community-engagement purposes.
This multilayered programme has evolved into a kaleidoscopic format. If a single year—a single edition—is one turn of the kaleidoscope’s chamber of coloured fragments, then the next turn transforms the image completely, even though most of the pieces remain the same. Space®opera is at once a walk, a meta-installation and a web app incorporating elements of an urban game. With edition 3.0, it also becomes a performance-and-music series and a site-specific audio drama divided into episodes. Together, these elements form a participatory music-theatre production unfolding across the city’s shared spaces.
It is also another cycle of parallel microresidencies for contemporary composers in educational and cultural institutions across the capital, as well as an attempt to connect the communities of artists, children, teenagers and—equally vital throughout the process—teachers, arts educators and educational practitioners. Some regard Space®opera as a project in which the reworking of certain fixed, ostensibly immutable elements of the compositional process generates a living web of reciprocal inspiration. Others see it simply as an experiment. For others still, it is an unusual series of music lessons and workshops in which children and young people can examine the creative process and working methods of a contemporary composer, while composers can observe the creative activity of children today. At very close quarters, both sides experiment for themselves with sound, sonority and image. Both therefore enter more deeply into the educational process: they truly come to know and genuinely experience. They acquire knowledge and remember it naturally—not by rote and not by studying remotely. They learn by doing, taking part directly in a shared, professional process of mutual inspiration and creative work. Because—let us be honest—no genuine shift in awareness, and no rigorous music or arts education, is possible without process-based thinking and sustained, coherent activity planned to last at least several weeks.
Space®opera 3.0 differs from the first, pilot edition in that it introduces several additional elements. At its heart is a coherent fairy-tale narrative centred on the title character: the Mountain Builder, who links all seven parts. Another of its principal outcomes is a distinctive form of site-specific audio drama: a work rooted in the content and character of a particular Warsaw location and designed to be heard in that very setting. Overarching it all is the theme of coexistence between nature and civilisation.
How does Space®opera 3.0 work?
Mode 1
You need not leave your seat to take this musical and literary walk. Travelling by eye and/or ear across the online map of seven locations in the capital, you can hear selected Warsaw sites as interpreted by children’s and youth choirs and composers.
Mode 2
You can choose your favourite location—provided that it is among those selected for the project—visit it on the day when its performance is scheduled (see the Little Warsaw Autumn calendar) and hear the next instalment of this urban music-theatre work unfold in that setting.
Please note that the events begin at different times: noon, 5 p.m., and 7 p.m. The advantage of this mode of participation is that you will meet everyone who helped create the site’s sonic portrait: the children, young people and adults who jointly devised the miniature. You will also see a performance accompanying the premiere of the audio drama in the city space itself.
Mode 3
For ambitious walkers, we offer another possibility. Join us throughout the 69th Warsaw Autumn Festival, on almost every festival day, to hear a mini choral concert and watch a miniperformance at each of this year’s Space®opera locations in turn, following the programme of the 16th Little Warsaw Autumn (see the Little Warsaw Autumn calendar).
Mode 4
Perhaps, on the other hand, you feel the need to augment reality or yearn for new intellectual experiences. Come alone, at any grey or golden hour, or any hour you please—to one of the seven locations, or visit each in turn. Find yourself a comfortable spot and, using the QR code available on the Space®opera website or near each location, listen to a story inspired by the surrounding area and the objects you find there. Naturally, you will need to bring your own mobile device for this purpose.
Mode 5
If compact solutions with real impact are more your style, come to the finale of this seven-part choral “walking series” at Terminal Kultury Gocław. There, on 27 September at noon, all the choral miniatures will be performed one after another as a concert-performance, forming a sonic portrait of the seven Warsaw locations that make up this musical walk. I would wager that this multilayered project can be experienced in several other ways as well. Part of the game, however, is discovering your own favourite mode.
Anna Kierkosz