Mixed Feelings

the waves are crashing, the sea level is rising. the tide washes trash onto the beach: junk and plastic in all shapes and colors. in the rhythm of the tides, a new age announces itself. the audience is stranded in the midst of things that have become unauthentic: between cables, data, sensors and plastic waste, they encounter the new forces of nature with mixed feelings — helplessness, anger, euphoria, sadness, comfort. but what to do?

«to act we have to have the beat» (ursula k. le guin): all communicative action is based on rhythm and vibration and strives for harmony. how can we enter into new resonances with our environment? what can the objects that surround us tell us about the world?

“mixed feelings” is a hybrid format of baroque opera, installation, and posthumanist ballet set to the moving beat of the tides. amidst living stranded goods, this co-feeling opera interrogates responsible action and cross-species empathy in the man-made age of crisis, the anthropocene.

a 30-minute audiovisual meditation sets the mood for the theater evening and complements it: a journey in the swell that floods the senses with crackling whitecaps, bubbling plastic bottles and surging emotions.