Thomas Köck & Michael v. zur Mühlen – opera - a future game / vienna edition

a post(operatic)-apocalyptic video game essay

with music by ole hübner
and texts by thomas köck
based on the opera opera, opera, opera! revenants&revolutions

The (in)ability of collective action, prognoses of the future, emerging utopias: In Thomas Köck’s text, a chorus of the last humans meets a cyborg. The final act takes place in an abandoned opera house ... Accompanied by an inner voice, the users wander through a landscape that tells of the disappearance of the present and of a society that can only think of the future as a catastrophe.

opera – a future game is an interactive digital music-theatre videogame essay based on an opera project that was interrupted in the wake of a pandemic. Fragments of the production, sets, costumes, orchestral and video recordings are transformed in this haunting digital version into a playable, proliferating archive, an immersive hybrid of gaming situation and interactive video art. For the Vienna Edition, Thomas Köck and Michael v. zur Mühlen will explore the representations of human bodies in digital environments in a 5-day research project on motion capture processes and expand the work previously presented at Essen Zollverein and Dresden HELLERAU, among others, to include a further performative level. The results will be shown as an analogue/digital happening and a mixture of collective Let's Play, Physical Theatre and Lecture Performance on the stage of the Burgtheater.

Austrian Premiere

Duration: 75 Min
Price: 22 Euro
Reduced: 18 Euro

With German and English surtitles.