Introduction

The purpose of the research is to analyze the possibility of preserving the librettos of modern Ukrainian Opera aperta — operas with an open plot and interactive components in the performances. To solve the problem, it is first necessary to identify the main difficulties of preservation, and to analyze the main characteristics of opera aperta and how they affect the possibility of preservation and reproduction.

Opera aperta is a genre of neo-avant-garde experimental music, which has Italian roots and was first presented by Umberto Eco at the XII Congress of Internazionale di filosofia in 1958, where he noted openness, indeterminacy, and aleatoricism as its main principles as well as polyvariability and controversy.Footnote ¹ The requirement of polyvariability will later become a real problem for cultural foundations, libraries, and other organizations dealing with the preservation of cultural heritage.

Avant-garde art projects are difficult to preserve, so special research groups have been created: the Variable Media Initiative from the Guggenheim Museum,Footnote ² International Network for Conservation of Contemporary Art (INCCA),Footnote ³ and others. The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) currently leads a consortium of 12 museums as part of the Museums and the Online Archive of California (MOAC). Thanks to the initiative of BAMPFA compiled “A Guide to Good Practices in Documenting and Preserving Works of Variable Media Art” but it cannot entirely be applied to operas with open plots.Footnote ⁴ Technical preservation approaches like migration, digitalization and, emulation only help with conserving stable elements, but do not solve the problem of variable parts and principles of instability and development of content.

Umberto Eco’s notion of “The Open Work” is an attempt to understand modern artworks which can be rendered open by their author, and further completed by the performer, viewer, reader or audience. This notion legitimates the variety of interpretations one work may give us.Footnote ⁵

This flexibility of composition is so fundamental in the genre of Opera aperta that theatre critic D’Amico believes that these works could be called “heterogeneous non-linguistic structures” rather than classical “works of art”Footnote ⁶

For a classical opera, a libretto (plot text) and a score (musical text) are enough to allow the opera to be preserved and performed in a theatre. In some cases, such as the Opera Garnier Library, librarians also keep posters, costumes, stage sets, paintings, and photographs to best preserve the operas. In Opera aperta, all these elements are variable. Usually, during the performance of open operas, a video is recorded and later posted on the project’s website. However, only providing open access to the recording does not solve the problem of storage, because the video on the internet or on electronic media does not make it possible to reproduce the project.

The most popular plot of open operas in Europe is the reinterpretation of the classics. Let us deconstructed it, as Derrida would have said.Footnote ⁷ One example would be an attempt to deconstruct Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the audience together with the performers tries to rewrite the text in every show, discovering new aspects of the well-known plot. Sometimes it is about overcoming gender stereotypes, sometimes it is about decolonization.

Ukrainian associations’ “neo-avant-garde operas” (the most famous is Opera Aperta by Illia Razumeiko and Roman Grygoriv) initially also used the practice of deconstructing classic plots. Before the beginning of the full-scale invasion, operas were staged: NeoOpera-horror Hamlet, whichran in Kyiv and in the catacombs of the Ivano-Frankivsk National Academic Theater and dramma per musica Romeo and Juliet, which was staged in the Promprylad plant.Footnote ⁸

If the opera aperta would remain exclusively a reinterpretation of the texts that have already been written and are preserved, then this would greatly simplify the task of preserving it in art collections. However, to reproduce such opera, one would need a classical text, a score of permanent fragments that do not change, instructions for the possible development of those parts that change in interaction with the audience and the interior, and a video recording of an example of a performance.

Modern Ukrainian projects of open operas have changed a lot in 2022-2024. Now they look like art activism actions that point to socio-political problems such as, Lullaby for Mariupol, Chernobyldorf, GAIA - 24 or art therapy project that let people to talk about trauma in a safe way. Therefore, the opera performs many additional social and therapeutic functions that must be preserved, and which makes it much more difficult to preserve than a typical performance. In Ukrainian Opera aperta, performances have changed in two aspects. They have changed the means of conversation, for example, performers of the GAIA-24 refused to use the original low-frequency vibrations at high volume due to complaints of discomfort from people who had survived the bombing. The second aspect of change: open operas respond to crises and collective traumas, but over time, traumas heal, so the visual accompaniment of operas also changes.

The opera Gaia-24, which was created as a reaction to an ecological disaster, was initially accompanied by the visual of a desolate desert, however, now the ecological disaster zone is green but poisonous, because a flood washed away a toxic waste repository. The video sequence and scenery have changed accordingly. Why is the genre of unstable opera so important for Ukrainian art? Catastrophe and tragedy, which are shown as a visual-sound combination, without a clear narrative structure and stable plot, give the opportunity for audience members to feel the catastrophe. Ukrainian artists provide the opportunity for the foreign viewer to not think about the tragedy of Ukraine, but to almost to feel what Ukrainians feel and to share their own experience through performance: “Theatre allows you to have the necessary distance to look at your trauma without experiencing it again”.Footnote ⁹ Importantly, the use of the nonverbal means makes it possible to feel the traumatic nature of the situation without directly witnessing cruelty, which can be useful for collective rethinking of the experience of trauma. For example, in GAIA-24 the death of animals during an ecological disaster is not shown, but the picture of the cracked earth hints that nature has suffered significant trauma.

The opera GAIA 24 is first and foremost a visual art with a collage of sound palette. Its preservation would require the libretto, video recordings, still images, and reference materials that can be used in further experiments for conversation about trauma.Some Ukrainian open operas, like the opera Sirens in principle do not have a libretto that could be preserved in the box. It looks like an invitation for the audience to discuss painful issues, and the audience becomes co-authors of the musical and literary text.

The announcement of the opera Sirens opens with the words: “What do you feel when you hear sirens”?Footnote ¹⁰ In this question, we see a dialogue between two worlds. That of a peaceful world, where the word “sirens” brought to mind mythological creatures that tempted the sailors of Odysseus and the modern world of war, where the sound of sirens wailing has a second meaning of an air alarm as an indicator of a potential missile attack.

In the first dialogue, an actor dressed as Empress Catherine addresses the audience in the pompous format of an opera: “I am Russian and I founded your city, why aren’t you happy with the Russian troops?” The audience responds that Catherine is lying: she did not found, but captured the Ukrainian city; the further course of the discussion depends on the audienceFootnote ¹¹. In the possibility of preserving the first part of this opera we can simply leave this question, but in order to repeat this opera, knowledge of the context of the city’s history is necessary. The opera can be staged in any other city, but then the question will be different and perhaps the character should be different, because a similar problem exists in many Ukrainian cities. Their real history was rewritten by Russian invaders, in the 15th-19th centuries, who claimed that they founded, but did not capture the city.Footnote ¹²

The second dialogue is the construction of a sound map of the city, where air alarms were added to the usual cries of martins and cats. The audience was invited to a dialogue in the construction of the map, and everyone had the opportunity to share their version of what the sounds of Odesa were for them.

The project was created within the framework of the Antonin Artaud Fellowship and did not receive further funding. Currently it only exists as an announcement on Facebook,Footnote ¹³ several photographs on the Fellowship website,Footnote ¹⁴ and a video recording of the siren’s aria. The only unchanged fragment in the opera. Therefore, the problem of preserving the memory of this art project is very acute. It allows us to work not only with the trauma of war, but also with the trauma of false cultural memory imposed by the invaders, the elimination of whom is now painfully taking place in Ukraine with the process of decolonization.

For comparison, let us the open opera Chornobyldorf, the preservation of which is less difficult. It was the most famous Ukrainian open opera around the world, as it won the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards in 2024.Footnote ¹⁵ The key theme of the opera was the misinterpretation of cultural objects in a post-apocalyptic world. Therefore, with a list of objects and permission from the authors, the new theater could offer further misinterpretation, which would be a successful continuation of the project.

The list of objects included ancient mythological, well-known historical or modern works, biblical and fairy-tale plots, samples of the epistolary genre (letters, diaries, memoirs), declassified government documents, movies, etc. As the authors note: “The musical language of the opera is based on the integration of folklore material from the Dnieper-Danube basin with microtonal music and deconstructed quotations from the classical-romantic era.”Footnote ¹⁶

What effort would be sufficient for the Chornobyldorf project to not disappear in the cultural space? The text, in which the concept of the opera is indicated, along with sources for citation, and video would allow the opera to be reproduced in the future. Also helpful for preservation is that the opera makers built an “Anthropological Museum” to create their alternative universe: from the fragments of the real and unreal worlds, the authors constructed a surreal set of artefacts allegedly found as a result of a pseudo archaeological expedition.Footnote ¹⁷

In the opera, an old blowtorch and a fire extinguisher were used as musical instruments, and musical instruments were used as part of rituals. In the world of Chornobyldorf everything was reset and the found artefacts were reinterpreted. - As the musicians said in interviews, “before Russian-Ukrainian war it was only our imagination, but after beginning of the war we understand that this could soon happen in reality if Putin unleashes a nuclear war”.Footnote ¹⁸

The opera changed a lot from production to production, but seven structural units of the plot, which represented an alternative reconstruction of cultural history, remained unchanged: “Elektra”, “Dramma Per Musica”, “Rhea”, “The Little Accordion Girl”, “Messe De Chornobyldorf”, “Orfeo Ed Euridice”, and “Saturnalia”. The set-box for the preservation of this opera should include a list of objects, libretto, musical score and a ticket to the «Chornobyldorf museum» or a 3D virtual tour on CD-ROM or DVD if this space is not available.