Justina PALTANAVIČIŪTĖ | Reflecting Creatively on the Present: The Disobedient Trajectories of Operomanija
The name of the production company Operomanija already suggests a passion for the opera genre. The firm, which has been in existence for more than 15 years and brings together artists from various fields under its roof for unique interdisciplinary projects, acts as a democratic space that encourages artists to rethink the nature of the opera genre, to constantly search for new forms of art, continually reinterpret the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, and creatively reflect on the present day and its realities. And although the works Operomanija produces are appreciated by audiences and critics not only in Lithuanian but also in foreign contexts, what’s important is not only the end result of the work but also its process – the joy and the freedom of creating together in an artistic collaboration.
Many lovers not only of opera but also contemporary art eagerly await the NOA (New Opera Action) festival of contemporary alternative opera and multidisciplinary art realized by Operomanija, which presents a bundle of refreshing, sometimes provocative artistic approaches to social reality, focusing on various social contexts – from the monotonous everyday life of the cashiers in the opera Have a Good Day! to the frank experiences of people working in the sex industry in Traviatas.
Ana Ablamonova, the producer who has had a firm grip on the steering wheel of Operomanija since the very beginning and who was awarded the Boris Dauguvietis earring at the Golden Cross of the Stage Awards 2023 for her search for new forms of stage expression, says that the desire to reflect on reality in opera is not unique to present-day creators. Today’s artists differ from historical ones by the context, allowing them to talk about acute topics much more freely and openly than in various periods when the content of opera was limited by censorship.
Our conversation with Ana is full of a special love for the genre of opera and gives a hint that the fictional narrative of the death of the genre, invented by opera scholars, is a myth – opera is not only history but also the present.
Ana, what is Operomanija? What are the ideas and attitudes that unite the works it produces and their creators?
At its inception in 2008, Operomanija was a community of creators, performers, researchers and other cultural actors who simply enjoyed being together and were really interested in making operas together, in exploring the limits and possibilities of this genre. Eventually, as the enthusiasm of the community faded and the members discovered new directions of creative interest, it all naturally transformed into a production company, which took responsibility for shaping the direction of the organization’s activities.
In the context of different projects, Operomanija started to work with different independent artists, shifting the focus to the creative process and the result while leaving the task of community building in the background. All the artists we are currently working with are creators with their own individual styles and often quite different artistic languages and visions. Operomanija brings them together around the ideas of the transformation and exploration of the possibilities of the operatic genre and takes on the functions of a producer – producing the works, the creative ideas, but not the artists themselves.
The community around such a phenomenon has formed by itself, but it and its unity are not the main goal. Today, Operomanija is an entity that works with very diverse aesthetics, styles and approaches to creativity which often contradict each other. We create an environment in which very different and unique creative processes can take place. What unites all of this is perhaps only the artists’ interest in the possibilities of the operatic genre, their free approach to its transformations based on the historical retrospective of the genre’s development and the individual ingenuity of the creators. There is no style that unites the artists collaborating with Operomanija. In fact, it would not only be inexpedient to look for one but probably also unethical towards the independent individuals who are part of the collaboration.
Theatre scholars see the separation of creators of the various forms of the opera genre from state institutions – and so the abandonment of the chic ritual of opera consumption – as a revolutionary act. Is it possible to discern in the works of Operomanija a desire to oppose the traditional form of opera and the phenomenon of opera itself?
When we started, opportunities for young artists to work in the opera genre were very limited. State institutions where all the opera activity was taking place at that time were quite closed. If there were opera studies or any programmes oriented towards young artists, they were mostly dedicated to singers. There were essentially no opportunities for authors and creators to try their hand at drama per musica. So, in this context, Operomanija emerged as an alternative: a platform where, as young people at the time, we could act, learn, collaborate, create, search and discover.
I don’t see the point of looking for some kind of opposition to the state institutions that create the opera genre. We are alternatives to each other, working with various creative methods and audiences. And a cultural event may not necessarily be in competition with another related cultural event. Sometimes we are competing with sports competitions, good or bad weather or political events for audience attention and other goods. Of course, some confrontations in creative decisions do happen from time to time, but it’s just a fun, sometimes slightly ironic flirtation. For example, the shortest nano-opera Dress Code: Opera (Rita Mačiliūnaitė, Jonas Tertelis, 2012 – author’s note) looked back at the “compulsory” rituals that accompany people going to the opera. And the recent opera Traviatas (Maximilian Oprishka, Artūras Areima, 2022) flirted with Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata. I don’t see the need to treat Operomanija as an opposition to traditional opera, also called classical or grand opera by opera scholars.
Who are the people creating at Operomanija? Are most of them young academic composers?
The artists who come together under the roof of Operomanija to create a specific work come from very different contexts, from academia, alternative or popular music, or any other medium. It’s not only composers or sound artists who inspire the work, as is the norm, but sometimes a director, a librettist, a singer or another professional who gives the impetus. The path to the creative process and the result varies widely. Any affiliation to a profession on this platform really varies, as a result of the specificity of the genre. In terms of age, there is also quite a broad range of creators and performers. Given that the origins of Operomanija lie in a peer-to-peer initiative, there is a certain age bias, but this is not the rule. Geographically, we work mainly with artists from Lithuania, but there have certainly been people from abroad – although proportionally far fewer because in such cases there are a number of additional logistical concerns and disruptions to the creative process.
Most of the works that appear under the roof of Operomanija are artistic reflections of today’s social problems, and often even very sensitive themes are chosen. Why do contemporary opera creators care about such themes?
It would be interesting to know what thoughts were going through Verdi’s mind when he wrote La Traviata, Aida or Rigoletto. Even the historical or mythological plots of classical operas can be treated as metaphors of sorts, revealing sensitive and relevant topics and social problems of the time. I’m sure that artists always want to reflect in their work on that multifaceted present, to express and give meaning to what is relevant to them. It’s only the paths that are taken that differ. In this respect, I would say that the present-day composers of the operatic genre are no different from those of the past. And even if a work of art is created as a kind of artistic ritual to be admired, without digging too deeply into any social problems, it captures what is relevant to the person behind it. An artist has the power not only to reflect but also to actualise various contemporary phenomena, to raise questions, however small, that are very significant to them. For example, the performance of Baroque theatre noise machines in sound artist Arturas Bumšteinas’ Bad Weather (2017) is one of the examples where there is no clear social message, but material is captured, a topic that is very important to the composer personally, a topic that fuels his imagination.
Do such works also fuel the audience’s imaginations?
I notice that artists quite rarely think of the viewer as the final consumer of the product because they get too deeply involved in the creative process. Of course, the creator is aware that without an audience in a performing arts space, hardly anything could happen at all. But the audience is not the endpoint, the "recipient" or "consumer", in the artist's imagination – it is usually one of the segments of the whole. For example, in works such as Confessions (Jens Hedman, Rūta Vitkauskaitė, Åsa Nordgren, 2015), or Glaze (Rimantas Ribačauskas, Mantas Jančiauskas, Jūra Elena Šedytė, Andrius Šiurys, 2019), when the audience is directly involved in the artwork or even becomes a part of it, the viewer is thought of as a kind of creative space. The creators behind the opera Confessions were interested in the effect of spatial sound on the human imagination. During the performance, the audience is seated in a certain acoustic space, the sound is created around them, its effects are observed, and different actions are taken depending on the audience’s reactions. In this case, the audience is a variable part of the work of art, and it’s fascinating to see how the work itself alters as the audience changes, especially when touring in other countries and in other cultural or social contexts. And does this relationship fuel the viewer’s imagination? It depends on many factors – many variables that offer a unique artistic experience every time.
Have there been any misunderstandings when an Operomanija piece has not met the audience’s expectations? After all, the word opera can indicate another code.
Yes, there have been. I notice that this sometimes happens after some gift-buying period, like Christmas and New Year, when tickets for events sell out in a flash. And then, at the events, some audience members who may have received tickets as gifts were clearly in the mood for a rather different kind of opera. We usually present works in slightly unusual contexts, in spaces that are not typical of classical opera. You can predict any dissatisfaction from people’s behaviour and body language before the performance even starts. For example, for the opera Have a Good Day! (Lina Lapelytė, Vaiva Grainytė, Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, 2011) the audience who queued to get into the hall expressed their dissatisfaction and resented this disrespect for them, even though queuing, like queuing at the checkout line in a supermarket, is a conceptual part of the work.
However, most visitors know where they are going. I think that in 15 years we have managed to create a medium whose concept and philosophy are quite clear to the public. Although opera is in many cases a fundamental starting point for creators when they start working, it’s often a point of departure into less-defined forms of interdisciplinarity. So, before each premiere, we try to find the most precise genre of the work – sound experience, space opera in the dark, comic opera, musical pictures, a concert with a choreographic urban tail (or tale) of a hippo, etc. A more precise reference like this helps the viewer prepare for the performance accordingly, to form more precise expectations.
In works like Radvila Darius, Son of Vytautas (Karolis Kaupinis, Birutė Kapustinskaitė, Arnas Mikalkėnas, Goda Paleikaitė, 2020) or Bumšteinas’ Audiokaukas (2015), fragments of programmes broadcasted by Lithuanian television around 1990 are used, taking us back to the beginning of the period of independence, and so have an air of nostalgia. Why did the composers choose material from this period?
The similarity between these two works is coincidental. Bumšteinas likes to work with the rethinking, reactivation and recomposition of already-existing material or objects. In this case, Audiokaukas is not the only work as such. For example, the Baroque theatre noise machines he used in his performance Bad Weather are devices for extracting sound effects that already existed in the 17th century and were brought to the centre of attention and resurrected in this performative sound art event. The case of Radvila Darius, Son of Vytautas is a coincidence: the director Karolis Kaupinis, who was invited to join the creative team of an opera reflecting on present-day problems in Lithuania, was working at the broadcaster LRT at the time and was researching the LRT archives in preparation for one of his future films. In his search for material, he noticed that many problems recur over time. I don’t think that in this case the documentary footage was used for nostalgia purposes, but rather as a means to look ironically at us, the people of today. Fragments of the footage from LRT broadcasts in 1989-1991 inspire different reactions from different audiences – people who were young then and may have been actively involved in the Sąjūdis independence movement probably cannot escape that moment of nostalgia. Younger audiences might look at these images with a certain anthropological curiosity. However, the aim of the creators of Radvila Darius, Son of Vytautas was to speak about the present.
I can also see the trend of archival materials or historical documentaries becoming an effective tool for analysing the present in other works produced by Operomanija, such as Glaze, made in 2019, which is based on the audio recordings of interviews with Holocaust survivors in the Vilnius ghetto. Glaze is about the fragility, temporality and variability of memory, which is relevant today. The work makes us think and reflect on how to live and behave today, especially in the face of the current war in Ukraine.
More uncomfortable issues are the focus of Traviatas, which is based on documentaries gathered by the authors revealing the realities of people working in the Lithuanian sex industry. In the context of drama theatre, the representation of socially vulnerable groups in society through documentaries has become quite a common phenomenon, even a trend. In the field of opera, it is still new. How did the idea of such an opera come about?
The idea has been around for quite a long time. The main impetus was the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Lithuanian National Opera, which provoked announcements by all the state-run music theatres that they were going to stage Verdi’s La Traviata. Although the pandemic slightly altered the announced plans, a number of productions of this classical masterpiece have seen the light of day. What attracted attention was the fact that all the theatres decided to celebrate the centenary in this way. What’s fascinating is not only the symbolic significance of this opus in the Lithuanian context but also the fact that the content of the work itself, the rather tragic story of a courtesan, has become a secondary issue, overshadowed by tradition and the glamour of the New Year champagne flute, so much awaited by the public. All this led us to think about how much classical opera as a phenomenon is capable of reflecting the present, of becoming an effective tool of theatre as a forum, and how much of it contains beautiful tradition, grand spectacle and social ritual. This is how the idea of creating an alternative opus based on contemporary traviatas emerged, trying to bring the audience back to the essence of the story and questioning the importance of this established tradition for national opera culture. The idea migrated through several authors and finally ended up in the hands of Maximilian Oprishka and Artūras Areima.
Another rather provocative work on the subject is the comic strip opera Alpha (2018) by Albertas Navickas, Gabrielė Labanauskaitė and Dr. GoraParasit, which subtly touches on LGBTQ+ issues. Does the audience appreciate the social or, in a way, even educational significance of such works? Or is the focus more on the artistic agenda?
The comic opera Alpha is a short but very intense and expressive work. I notice that the audience when they see it for the first time is often amazed by the artistic expression, the change of everything, the pace and the intensity. I know that some people have decided to go for a second time to concentrate on the story and the themes that are explored. Does the audience appreciate its social significance? Possibly, yes. I can draw this conclusion from members of the LGBTQ+ community who frequently attend the opera.
Meanwhile, the sound experience of the Vilnius ghetto in Glaze is a case that undoubtedly has an educational mission. We already know the regulars who come again and again and bring a new friend or family member. In addition, Glaze has been included in the educational programme Cultural Passport.
How might you describe the functions of Operomanija in the context of Lithuanian contemporary art? Perhaps it’s a habitat for innovative ideas in the performing arts?
Operomanija is part of the Lithuanian performing arts ecosystem, which I would like to believe is important. And this importance is not about the company but about the artworks it produces – the content. I’ve been dealing with state institutions quite a lot lately, and I realise how comfortable it is for artists but at the same time how difficult it is to create within them. It’s paradoxical: all the systems, mechanisms, unions and other structures of state institutions seem to be designed for the convenience of artists, but at the same time they are maddeningly restrictive of other kinds of creativity, of new creative methods that are not adapted to the established system. In all this context, Operomanija has managed to achieve a certain balance that can provide some conditions for artists to concentrate on creating without the system rather than on creating within it. The absence of a system, the compactness and flexibility of the organisation, give artists the freedom and the possibility of realising different creativity. Of course, this comes at a price – the absence of infrastructure leads to certain infrastructural and logistical constraints, a lack of human resources to service the processes, as the creative process is stretched out over time, the honorariums become unequal to the time invested in the creative process, and many other nuances. But still, this is already a medium that allows one to work in a way that is best for the individual creative idea, and is therefore quite open to otherness and uniqueness.
How does the creative process at Operomanija work? What’s the role of the performers in it?
Each creative process is unique in its own way. There is no one-size-fits-all formula. The performers often become part of the creative process, and sometimes they are just the performers of the created work. In all cases, we try to collaborate with those artists who are interested in the idea of the work, who find the idea resonant and engaging. A positive attitude and openness to the creative process, to the rules of the game and to experimentation proposed by the creators, are very important factors that have an impact on the success of a work.
Performers’ involvement in the creative process happens at very different stages. Often, new works are created with very specific performers and their potential already in mind. In such cases, the performers often also offer certain solutions to the composers. For example, in the musical performance Sports Group (Gabrielė Labanauskaitė, Gailė Griciūtė, Viktorija Damerell), which premiered in 2022, the team of performers rehearsed for a long time with the authors, playing the organ trainers specially designed for the piece, and improvising with various extended techniques, before Gailė Griciūtė finally composed a certain musical fabric.
Meanwhile, the cellists of Traviatas were given sheet music and, in just a few rehearsals, seamlessly integrated themselves into the production by simply performing the parts that were created for them. The vocalists who took part in Traviatas spent some time with the composer in the recording studio, where they improvised according to specific instructions and tasks, recording different versions of the vocal parts, which the composer then used to create the opera’s soundtrack. The performers of the concert with a choreographic tail, The Urban Tale of a Hippo (choreographed by Panayiotis Kokoras, Andrius Katinas, Nanni Vappavuori, 2022), were the ensemble Synaesthesis – although it may have been unusual for them, they didn’t only play in the space of the work but also played the roles of certain characters, which required them to work hard to learn the rather tricky parts by heart and participate in the rehearsals.
The ambition of Operomanija is to find artists with whom collaboration would be interesting and enjoyable and who would also find it interesting and enjoyable to work with the organisation. This circle of professional collaborators and mutual trust is gradually growing.
The works produced by Operomanija are successful not only in Lithuania but also abroad. In which foreign contexts does it find itself?
The works produced by Operomanija are quite diverse, so they can be presented in a wide variety of environments: a drama theatre or a performing arts festival, opera, contemporary music, sound art or even dance events; theatres of different types (black-box, proscenium, teatro all'italiano, etc.), concert halls, galleries, churches, warehouses, sports arenas, and other unexpected spaces. Recently, Navigations (Bumštein’s Baroque theatre noise machine performance from the Bad Weather series) caught the interest of a puppet and object theatre festival. By producing such a wide variety of works, and constantly shifting between different disciplines, we can actually be quite flexible in adapting to different contexts. So the contexts of foreign festivals, of spaces for presenting works, are very, very different.
How did you find yourself at Operomanija? How do you get the inspiration and patience for great works?
I have told this story many times. On 27 September 2007, I was walking down the corridor of the main building of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre and saw a small advert: young composers are creating new operas and looking for performers. As I had just finished my studies in choral conducting in St. Petersburg, I thought I’d volunteer to be a chorus master. I met with Jonas Sakalauskas, whose contact details were in the advert, and we agreed to work together. Gradually, the work expanded from music to management and organisation (this was my second speciality, the subtleties of which I was studying at the LMTA at the time in my master’s degree), we realised the first short opera festival NOA (New Opera Action), and then we founded the public institution Operomanija – and here I am, for more than 15 years already. And patience... Sometimes I run out of fuel, but I’ll stay for a while. There are still ideas and concepts that I would like to realise, and there are also interesting partnerships I would like to develop. Besides, you never know what opportunity, what idea is waiting for you today or tomorrow. It will be interesting to see what comes next. At the same time, I feel that in the near future some transformations of Operomanija will need to be made. The potential and the content generated far outstrip the resources available and that can be squeezed into living on in the same format. I’m thinking a lot about this at the moment.
Let’s get back to the original point: what is contemporary opera, a much discussed but undefined term?
When thinking about opera, the first thing we want to do is to recall the etymology of the word (in Italian and Latin, opera means "work" or "piece"), to go back to the roots of the genre and, at the same time, keep in mind that we are living in the present day. Opera produced by Operomanija is one of the contemporary versions of it, which is born in a process of joint work and discussion between creators from different fields. This process is often full of enthusiasm and passion. I imagine that in the Florentine Camerata, which is associated with the birth of opera, similar things might have happened. And although its members’ main ambitions were focused on the revival of ancient tragedy, that fellowship, the spirit of experimentation and the creativity of people from different fields sounds like something very interesting, close and understandable. So, when we talk about the contemporary operas produced by Operomanija, we want to go back to the origins of the genre – to the search for interdisciplinary art forms, to the very poiesis that is used to record and rethink the present.