Exploring weak opera: care, multiplicity and listening in RISE year 3 (2022–2023)

Abstract

Contemporary opera increasingly draws on sophisticated technology, expanding its aesthetic possibilities while intensifying the ecological costs, institutional hierarchies and technical infrastructures involved in its production. RISE (Reflective Iterative Scenario Enactments), a five-year research-creation project at Concordia University, responds to this condition through experimental mini-, micro- and nano-operas. Focusing on RISE Year 3 (2022–2023), this article draws on Gianni Vattimo’s notion of weak thought to propose the concept of weak opera: an operatic practice that loosens strong forms of authorship, narrative, technological mastery and institutional authority. Through close readings of the four Year 3 works, the article argues that care, multiplicity, consent, vulnerability and listening function as compositional methods rather than thematic additions. Handle with Care: Values in Our Hearts, Heart Tethers, Lento and Waste Whisperer articulate, respectively, weak form, weak technology, weak temporality and weak materiality. Together, these works suggest that opera remains viable for a wide range of artists and performers not by preserving inherited forms of mastery, but by cultivating relationality, interpretative openness, ecological responsibility and collective listening.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2026 · DOI ↗