MEDIATHEK

Blurring the conventional boundaries between audience and performer, venue and stage, Mathis Nitschke’s short opera Viola places its audience in the window of a shop, and turns the whole of the outside world into a stage. While audience members become an object of curiosity for passing pedestrians, one of the members of the public goes almost unnoticed – until she starts to sing. The shop windows become huge glass loudspeakers, transmitting Viola’s plaintive song to the viewers within, yet also preventing her from being able to make the connection she seems so ardently to desire.