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Sustainability - Next Stage © FEDORA i
Sustainability On, Behind & Beyond the Stage
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09 May 2024
FEDORA's Activities
FEDORA is dedicated to integrating sustainability into all its initiatives, recognising the imperative of environmental consciousness in today's world. This commitment shapes our support for creative projects, ensuring that sustainability is not an afterthought but a fundamental consideration from the start.
Our funding programs celebrate projects that embody ecological principles, encouraging the creation of artworks that inspire and promote eco-responsibility, by driving artistic innovation and contributing to more tangible environmental outcomes, such as reducing carbon footprint and promoting circular energy systems.
Some FEDORA Prize Winners showcase projects that embody this commitment, by raising awareness about pressing environmental issues and inviting the audience to reflect, act, and initiate a change. Other projects not revolving around sustainability incorporate the use of recycled material, the utilisation of more energy-efficient technologies, the decrease of carbon footprint, and other eco-friendly behaviors among artists, staff, and audiences.
Similarly, our Next Stage Grants Recipients have utilised their funding to pioneer sustainable practices within their respective fields on, behind, and beyond the stage. These projects help set new industry standards by sharing their technologies or by initiating replicable changes that create a ripple effect to shape the cultural landscape as a whole.
Furthermore, our Next Stage Capacity-Building initiatives help build a community of innovators committed to sustainable practices. We organise, in collaboration with our expert partners, online workshops and seminars that connect artists and creatives to industry experts, initiating sustainability dialogues and the sharing of best practices.
On the other hand, our Platform Members are invited to create annual Roadshows within their own communities that serve as forums for exchanging best practices and forging collaborations centered around sustainability, amplifying the impact of our collective efforts.
Discover all the FEDORA Prize winners, Next Stage Grants Recipients, capacity-building workshops, and Platform Members’ Roadshows that tackle and are centered around sustainability on, behind, and beyond the stage.
FEDORA Prize Winners
Like flesh - Opéra de Lille
Like flesh is a dark contemporary myth informed by queer politics and environmental sciences. It offers an urgent warning against our destructive relationships with each other and our world. A new chamber opera in one act, Like flesh.
Mont Ventoux - KOR'SIA
Inspired by Petrarca's Ascent of Mont Ventoux, the KOR'SIA collective seeks answers from the humanist past for the conflicts being proposed to us by a 21st-century paradigm shift: the construction of an individual capable of rebuilding themselves and the planet.
FEDORA Next Stage
Sustainable Costumes - OPER LEIPZIG
Oper Leipzig and Icelandic Opera have acknowledged the responsibility of major cultural institutions toward climate change. “Sustainable Costumes” was inspired by the work and research of Urs Dierker on sustainable transition in the field of costume design. Dierker is a textile artist, researcher, and founder of the Circular Costume Design platform. It investigates different phases of several opera productions to assess how sustainable changes can be achieved using various strategies – green design (focus on material), life-cycle thinking (focus on processes) and participatory practices (focus on social aspects of change).
ISOLDE - Irish National Opera
A transformative digital project that aims to revolutionise the presentation, sustainability and access of opera through the medium of Street Art Operas that explore climate change. They are a unique blend of opera, street art & animation, presented as outdoor video & sound installations projected onto buildings. These presentations of Street Art Opera to date have been remarkably successful and fully subscribed, but have been limited in scale because of the current technology options available.
XR Stage - Finnish National Opera and Ballet
The “XR Stage” project aims to develop a functional digital twin of the physical opera stage. The purpose is to modernize the production process of the performances from the artistic design work and decision-making, to engineering and manufacturing, and all the way down to stage operations during rehearsal period. Virtualization of the stage addresses several topics around the artistic quality, operational efficiency, and sustainability of the productions. Virtual model illustrates the set in its final form, and it can be processed further on-line without need for travel. It is a reliable input for engineering and provides early access to the scenes for the lighting and projections’ design.
FEDORA Next Stage Capacity-Building (2024)
Next Stage capacity-Building Workshop on Sustainability
The aim of these workshops, delivered in collaboration with our expert partner Aktionsnetzwerk Nachhaltigkeit, was to introduce participants to sustainable management systems and carbon footprinting, as well as industry priorities. Fourteen participants attended the session.
FEDORA Platform Members' Roadshows
Albert Herring Premiere & Next Stage Grants - POZNAN OPERA HOUSE
General Manager of the company, introduced the Next Stage initiative to attendees during a special event, emphasising three development paths, three challenges for opera companies to work together for a better future – sustainability, inclusivity and digital technologies.
Ine Aya' Tour - WORLD OPERA LAB
World Opera Lab created a new opera that takes widespread deforestation as its subject. This is the very first opera about deforestation on Kalimantan.
Sustainable goals - FREUNDE UND FÖRDERER DER STAATSOPER UNTER DEN LINDEN E.V.
Artistic Director Matthias Schulz presented the sustainability goals and projects of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden to the Members of Freunde und Förderer der Staatsoper Unter den Linden.
sound:waves festival - STAATSOPER HANNOVER
Staatsoper Hannover started the sound:waves festival to invite people with and without disabilities - regardless of age, origin, socio-economic background and educational biography - to a collective creative process. sound:waves gives room to people of all levels of bodily and cognitive ability to explore sound and its vibrations by building and playing fantastical, non-classical instruments and fixing them within the installation. While some of these instruments are readymade, repurposed or found, others are made of recycled trash. In building, participants are encouraged to make music with everyday items. In playing, they are encouraged to discover musicality within themselves.
Grüne Soirée & "Sustainable Costumes" project - OPER LEIPZIG
Sustainable Costumes - "Thanks to Opera Europa and FEDORA, we will now analyse the life cycle of our costumes in four opera productions. Especially in the craft sector, we can turn crucial screws to achieve convincing standards of sustainability."
Sustainable practices - NATIONALTHEATER MANNHEIM
Detlef Grooß, responsible for sustainability and musician in the orchestra at Nationaltheater Mannheim, explains how the house is transforming its processes to be more sustainable.
Like Flesh on Operavision - OPERA DE LILLE
The opera "Like flesh" led by Opéra de Lille, winner of the FEDORA Opera Prize 2021, is now available to stream on OperaVision. Discover this beautiful opera that "sings the story of nature, from its genesis to the hope of rebirth after destruction".
The Magic Flute by director Miroslav Krobot - NÁRODNÍ DIVADLO BRNO
The first opera directed by actor and drama director Miroslav Krobot, The Magic Flute, premiered in Národní divadlo Brno. At the core of the production, there were modern digital technologies, sustainability in set and costume design, and a new artistic concept of a classical opera piece.
Operafest Lisboa 2023 - ÓPERA DO CASTELO
Ópera do Castelo produced the 4th edition of Operafest Lisboa, an independent opera festival born during the pandemic and led by soprano singer Catarina Molder. Under the moto "From heaven to hell", this year's programme presented 5 new opera productions, including 13 performances, and offered 40 singing lessons to curious opera enthusiasts, making Lisbon vibrate with opera.Operafest Lisboa also strives to be a green and inclusive festival, by recycling its set designs and costumes and avoiding waste, use of plastics and polluting materials.
Towards a sustainable future - FREUNDE UND FÖRDERER DER STAATSOPER UNTER DEN LINDEN E.V.
Sustainable Listening is now an integral part of the programme of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. Furthermore, there are musicians of the Staatskapelle performing in the Orchestra of Change, which is a German wide ensemble of musicians who are committed to climate protection and sustainability in music and support a reforestation project in Madagascar.
© Trailer video NTM i
The Whale - NATIONALTHEATER MANNHEIM
The Whale takes as its basis the true incident of a sperm whale that died on a beach in Oregon in 1970 and was subsequently blown up by the authorities. As a parable, this incident is meant to stand for the way we deal with natural impacts and catastrophes and, in particular, to draw attention to climate change. Although the public would like to rely on technological solutions in this regard, a transformation of individual consciousness is required to achieve a sustainable impact. What could have been done differently to avoid blowing up the whale as a short-sighted emergency solution?
Deutsche Oper am Rhein takes actions in sustainability
Uta Gardemann and the green team of Deutsche Oper am Rhein organised the RhineCleanUp, an event dedicated to cleaning up and collecting rubbish on the banks of the river Rhine in Düsseldorf. The aim is to draw attention to the pollution of rivers and seas, as well as to raise awareness among employees on the issue of waste in the opera house and in the production of stage sets.
Sustainability at the Prague National Theatre
The Prague National Theatre is the largest theatre in the Czech Republic, and the size of its facilities and operations reflects this. Awareness of their responsibility to the planet and the environment has led them to establish a team that work diligently to make their operations more efficient and sustainable. Although this need has been accelerated by the energy crisis, the principles of sustainability apply to power strategies as well as to the production of sets and costumes, the functioning of the entire institution, catering, and even interpersonal relationships.
Cassandra Festival - LA MONNAIE/DE MUNT
Cassandra tells the story of a woman, Sandra, who divides her time between her research into the melting ice caps and stand-up comedy. Concerned about her recent discoveries about the impact of human activity on the environment, she wants to use humour to raise awareness. But people around her are sceptical, as is her own family. Just as Cassandra predicted the fall of Troy without being heard, Sandra predicts the imminent approach of a terrible tragedy, but no one seems to be listening.
