Why — STOPERA!
The performing arts are undergoing a profound transformation.
The boundaries between music, theatre, image, technology, research and performance are dissolving, giving way to new forms of writing that reshape how we tell the world. It is in this context that STOPERA! was born.
STOPERA! brings together artists, researchers, institutions and audiences around a common question: what stage forms for the 21st century?
STOPERA! is not a company, nor a collective, nor merely a producer: it is a light infrastructure for research and creation dedicated to the new forms of contemporary musical theatre.
The name states the method. The STOP is not a refusal of opera: it is a suspension. The silence that gives sound its shape, the pause from which the gesture is born.
Everything today pushes to produce — fast, and towards opening night. STOPERA makes the opposite wager: to preserve the time before, the time of research and risk, without which nothing new comes into being. We stop to search, then we create.
Our ambition: to transform the way opera and music theatre are conceived, made and passed on.
Rooted in Gentilly and active from Lyon to Buenos Aires, STOPERA! produces works, supports artists, develops artistic research laboratories and builds lasting cooperations between institutions, researchers, performers and audiences.
More than a company, STOPERA! is a space where works develop over the long term, cross disciplines and experiment with new modes of creation. An opera may begin in a conversation with a novelist, in a Czech novel from 1936 or in a Pasolini film — then take shape across several seasons, between a national centre for musical creation, an opera house and a festival.
At the heart of this approach, one conviction: the great transformations of our time — technological, ecological, social — call for new forms of embodiment. They run through the works we carry: OOO, a post-human opera where objects, nature and a failing artificial intelligence inherit a world emptied of its humans; We Expected the Disaster… but not the salamanders!, an ecological fable after Karel Čapek; Otages, after Nina Bouraoui, which makes social violence audible. Music, voice, body, text, space, image and technology are not separate disciplines here, but components of a single living writing.
Around Sebastian Rivas gather artists, performers, authors, researchers and producers — percussionist Olivia Martin, soprano Nicola Beller Carbone, director Martin Bauer, curator Anne-Laure Chamboissier — with the artistic companionship of Georges Aperghis. The works are made with the CETC at the Teatro Colón, the Opéra de Lyon, GRAME — CNCM, the Tête à Tête festival and UNSAM.
Through its creations, its LIPS laboratory, its residencies and its transmission work, STOPERA! contributes to renewing contemporary stage writing and to the emergence of a shared research space between artistic creation, innovation and society.