The impact is powerful: An ocean of plastic billows on a large screen in the background. Twelve singers emerge, dressed in costumes associated with everything from the Inuit to tourists in black sunglasses – as if straight from a dystopian futuristic film.

The wall of sound is compelling. Vibrating and trembling with disquiet under the skin of the audience, with the choir like a unison siren.

The next image: Church bells and black-and-white images of an abandoned, ruined city.

The acclaimed opera NeoArctic sucks us into an emotional centrifuge. We travel through post-apocalyptic landscapes – tsunamis, floods, melting glaciers – in order to, in the final scene, still enjoy a kind of forgiving, sacred music.

If there was a genre called “activist performance”, then that is exactly what the audience will be witnessing in this poetic and alarming performance of the time we are living in right now: Anthropocene, the Age of Man. It is the proposed new geological epoch on earth that began, approximately, during industrialization in the 18th century, and which is characterized by the fact that we humans are responsible for the greatest changes to the climate – not nature itself.

In terms of dramaturgy, the opera is made up of twelve songs, twelve soundscapes, twelve landscapes and a planet, with song titles such as Plastic, Dust and Infinity. British techno producer Andy Stott and the New York-based composer Kristus Auznieks, currently one of Latvia’s brightest stars, are responsible for the electronic accompaniment. The text was written by the Icelandic poet Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson, more commonly known as Sjón, a contraction of his first name and also the word “sight” in Icelandic.

The work, which won the prestigious Danish Reumert Prize in 2017, emerged from a concept created by the Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma, in collaboration with the Latvian Radio Choir. The première took place at The Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen in May 2016. Earlier this year, it was performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

Hotel Pro Forma is one of Europe’s foremost performance groups. They have previously performed in Stockholm, with works including Calling Clavigo, at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in 2003.

NeoArctic is the result of long-term research and exploratory work carried out by artists, scientists and others from various fields, with inspiration from the Anthropocene Project, a number of installations and research projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Since 2013, the Haus der Kulturen in Berlin has been exploring the new, revolutionary era we are currently living in through a mixture of modern art and pioneering research.

Text: Ylva Lagercrantz Spindler