Backyard Opera

Based on a series of experimental music dramatic tableaux – the Backyard Pictures – SCENATET is creating a unique and site-specific musical dramatic performance – A Backyard Opera.

The work is created by the Danish composer Bent Sørensen in cooperation with conceptual artist and curator Anna Berit Asp Christensen and SCENATET.

One of the primary artistic ambitions with the Backyard Opera is to explore the musical drama genre.
An opera and instrumental theatre in a real backyard – not a written scenography – where outdoor space and its houses, facades, windows, people and equipment get voices and becomes music.
A performance in which the backyard is the real protagonist and the audience will experience how it is brought to life with words, sounds and images.

Both the stage and the libretto are not as the audience commonly know them.
The libretto is a giant mosaic of fragments of text – from single detached phrases to longer fragments, from the unknown mail correspondence and diary notes, graffiti and words in the city and on the backyard walls.

From the fragments a course of action – real and unreal – will form and accumulate in Backyards Opera‘s thematic focal point: Loneliness.

The Backyard Opera will premiere in August 2021 at the Copenhagen Opera Festival.

Backyard Opera is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, Danish Composers’ Society’s Production pool, Augustinus Fonden, KODA and Wilhelm Hansen Fonden.