'The audience’s role became much more empathetic': inside Opera on Brainwaves

Imagine being able to see what’s going on in a performer’s head as they stand on stage. Their inner emotional state, rather than what they’re deliberately projecting to the audience. For some artists, this would be the stuff of nightmares, but for Flemish soprano Elise Caluwaerts it’s an idea so intriguing that it’s inspired her to create Opera on Brainwaves, a highly unique project merging the worlds of classical music, science and fashion.

Set to premiere at the 2023 edition of Rotterdam’s O Festival, before embarking on an international tour, Opera on Brainwaves will see Caluwaerts perform a newly commissioned 30-minute monologue opera written by Christian Jost to a libretto by Gaea Schoeters, while wearing a specially commissioned dress by fashion tech designer Jasna Rok. This dress will have inbuilt EEG and heartbeat sensors that will be measuring Caluwaerts’s emotional state throughout the performance, with the emotions they capture projected onto big screens for the audience to see. Certain audience members will also be hooked up to sensors, so that their reactions to what they’re seeing and hearing can likewise be measured and displayed, meaning that the audience as a whole will have a visual of the collective emotion being experienced. The opera will be produced by Musiktheater Transparent and directed by Lisenka Heijboer Castanon.

‘Opera is already a very empathetic experience for people, because of the narrative, and I find it fascinating to watch the effect it has on people,’ Caluwaerts tells me over Zoom. ‘So when at the end of 2018 I met Jasna, whose projects include working with Nasa to make spacesuits monitoring the emotional states of astronauts, I immediately wanted to make a link with opera. There are so many things that we as performers learn to hide: our weaknesses, our stress, our concentration. The actual experience of performing is not shown.' She continues, ‘Meanwhile I was aware of a few scientific studies on empathy. For instance, a 2014 study found that when people were shown images of actors putting their hands in ice water, their body temperature would go down. So I thought, “What happens if suddenly an EEG sensor is exposing that an opera singer is highly excited or highly stressed?”’

Rok was interested in collaborating. So, next came a test run at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum, using one of Rok’s old dresses, to establish whether there was enough public appetite to justify the huge sum of money that Caluwaerts would need to not only commission an opera, but a dress using such expensive, brand-new technology that ‘you could buy a house with it’. And there was. ‘It was incredible,’ she remembers. ‘Even without seeing their own emotion, the audience’s role became much more active and empathetic.’

The rest of the project’s pieces and people fell into place remarkably smoothly. Christian Jost quickly accepted, and Gaea Schoeters soon afterwards. Muziektheater Transparent wanted to produce, after which Linsenka Heijboer Castanon joined. Fundraising took a year and a half, aided by some of Antwerp’s biggest corporations, including the City Marketing Fund, The Flying Group and the Port of Antwerp. Then in 2020 a further partner arrived in the shape of the University of Antwerp, which will run its own scientific project linked to the opera – logging and storing the data from the performances, in order to study what engages audiences and makes them feel, and what happens when people feel things together and feel connected. Essentially, it turned out that if an idea is good enough, then people will come on board. ‘I have to say that it wasn’t that hard’, Caluwaerts marvels. ‘What was hard was Covid. So for example a certain bank said yes for a certain amount of money, but then almost went bankrupt and had to withdraw. But there were so many CEOs and companies that wanted to help us, because I think people got really enthusiastic about this merging of science, the arts and emotions. I really think the key word is “Connection”.’

Which chimes with what Christian Jost tells me himself. ‘This is a brand new, unique idea’, he enthuses. ‘In my life so far I’ve composed ten major operas for major opera houses in Europe, experiencing all the difficulties and pleasures of working with these huge machines, always with a lot of people involved. So at this stage of life I’m very attracted to working with smaller groups, and I was hooked by these women’s creativity and enthusiasm. This is something that hasn’t been done before – although a historical parallel could be a big project that Scriabin began, exploring how scent could help an audience experience a piece of music more deeply – and I didn’t completely understand how it was all going to work. But that was even part of the temptation. To say, ‘Okay, let’s start, and see what we end up with”.’

Jost will begin writing this autumn, once he has seen the completed dress. So, as we speak, he still doesn’t know exactly what they will end up with. A few early definites, though, are that the opera will be themed around Utopia/Dystopia, and scored initially for ensemble (to make it Covid-proof and touring-friendly), but eventually for orchestra as well. Jost also isn’t envisaging that the project’s technology element will mean he’s composing in a different way to usual. ‘Each piece is different anyway’, he reasons. ‘I can only do what my heart tells me, which might be a very old fashioned attitude to writing music, but that’s my way. I work by having my inspiration sparked by something – in this case seeing what this alien dress does to the singer – and so then the big question with this project will be whether I’m so inspired that I come up with something that I didn’t think of before. Intuitively, I feel that this will be the case, so of course now I’m hoping! What I can say at this point is that I’m not envisaging any electronic music, because I think that the project is already so technology-orientated that it needs to have something more analogue in contrast to it, rather than just doubling the idea. But it might be an analogue sound that’s somehow very transparent, giving it an electronic feeling’.

Back to Caluwaerts and what she feels the wider value of such a project is, and in social terms she’s aiming for the heavens. ‘I truly believe that art can create a better world, and that as artists we can help an audience have a transformational experience that does a lot of good,’ she states. ‘Science shows us that, whatever experience you have, you train your brain to repeat that experience. So while the audience is having this highly empathetic experience, the brain makes connections that it will retain and continue to apply afterwards, even subconsciously.’

On the other hand, this is by no means an attempt to shake up the operatic world. ‘These sorts of experiments don’t have to change opera, because I don’t think opera needs to change,’ she emphasises. ‘I think it’s perfect as it is, and it’s the thing I probably love most in life. But I do think we can experiment with ideas that show us different aspects to it that we haven’t yet experienced, and that for some people could even represent a more intense experience.’ But does she envisage Opera on Brainwaves attracting new audiences? ‘I think the attracting other audiences is a side effect.’

She concludes: ‘What is really encouraging the Opera on Brainwaves team is that we feel from all sides – from the tech world, the fashion world, the opera world and programmers – that everyone gets highly excited about having a visual of the thing that we as artists most want to provoke.’ Before quipping, ‘But you know what the big challenge would really be? What if you don’t see anything?’

Watch a video exploring the project in more detail below.

For more information click here.