Elysium at Den Norske Opera & Ballett

A hundred years into the future humans have managed to create a new and improved version of themselves. Norwegian composer Rolf Wallin has created the opera Elysium, about the meeting between “the old” human and “the new” human. Together with British author Mark Ravenhill, he has here created a love story and a fable about our innate fear of change. Elysium poses questions about who we are and who we want to be.
Saved by technology

The future. The transhumans look back at the 21st century with horror. More than 200 years after the first declaration of human rights, we were still unable to be fully human. We were in the process of self-destruction through war and environmental devastation.

Our salvation would turn out to be a technological device created to improve communication between people: a computer chip implanted in the neck. It produces a strange, fascinating sound that transfers enormous amounts of information, thousands of times more rapidly than our plodding speech. Instead of continually misinterpreting each other, we were now able to exchange complex feelings and experiences easily and accurately. Thus, the people of the future have rediscovered themselves as a species and created the peaceful and successful transhuman human, not subject to disease or death.

Even so, they have a great respect for their origins. They have preserved under stringent security precautions, in order to protect themselves and the planet, 40 original humans, who once a year perform Beethoven’s opera Fidelio for an audience of transhumans. This is to recall the long battle for human rights, which humans praised in their speeches but never managed to bring to reality.

The drama follows two women, a Wife who desires to break out from the difficult life of the humans, and a transhuman Woman who longs to return to the truly human. The two meet, and are attracted to each other. The opera takes place in this field of tension between the new and the old. The tension is felt in the musical expression, which extends from fragments of Beethoven’s undying opera about human value to electronically processed voices that flitter weightless under the candelabras of the opera house.

Elysium is a fable about the innate fear of humans for change. The introduction of democracy, the abolition of slavery, female emancipation, the rights of minorities: each step appears to be obvious with hindsight, but each was met with powerful, often violent, resistance and were branded as “unnatural”. It remains so in many places in the world. Maybe not as a result of evil, but simply because facing change feels like standing on the edge of a precipice: one step forwards and we’ll fall into the abyss.

Where is your pivot point between the natural and the unnatural? Maybe in the process that is under way just now, as modern technology slowly but surely transforms people: possibly to something terrible and inhuman, possibly to something fantastic, more human than humans? Only the future has the answer, and we have not arrived in the future – yet.
Artistic team

Rolf Wallin is one of Scandinavia’s leading contemporary composers, whose works are continuously being commissioned and performed by various ensembles in Norway and abroad. His background ranges from jazz, avantgarde rock and early music, to a traditional classical training. Mark Ravenhill is a British actor, writer and author, whose works include the highly praised play Shopping and f*cking. Director is the British theatre and opera director David Poutney, while opera set designer Leslie Travers has created the visual expression.