VIOLA – A Short Opera in Public Space

The audience sits in the pharmacy and looks through the shop windows at Pasing Station Square. Viola, an apparently sad and disoriented woman, appears there. She seems to be in shock, having lost touch with time and space: “Is that inside or outside now? Is it still yesterday today?”

Blurring the conventional boundaries between audience and performer, venue and stage, Mathis Nitschke’s short opera Viola places its audience in the window of a shop, and turns the whole of the outside world into a stage. While audience members become an object of curiosity for passing pedestrians, one of the members of the public goes almost unnoticed – until she starts to sing. The shop windows become huge glass loudspeakers, transmitting Viola’s plaintive song to the viewers within, yet also preventing her from being able to make the connection she seems so ardently to desire.