City Opera (2026) 

City Opera explores the threshold between signal and noise: what we hear as meaningful, what we filter out, and which urban sounds we have learned to accept, desire, or reject.

The seven-act performance unfolds over a 24-hour period, following four performers and an opera singer stranded in a city after their train is cancelled due to a “signal failure.” Moving through public space, they inhabit and embody figures whose voices and presences are alternately celebrated, tolerated, or policed: the street musician, the opera singer, the preacher, the club visitor, and the tourist group.

The performance takes shape through sound, text, song, monologue, and choreography. Its point of departure is the rise of what media scholar Mack Hagood calls orphic media: noise-cancelling headphones, white-noise machines, and algorithmic playlists. These technologies promise control and focus by creating private auditory bubbles, allowing us to filter out unwanted sounds. Where Orpheus once forged a shared sonic passage away from the Sirens, contemporary listening increasingly isolates and excludes. Listening becomes a form of individualized self-care, shaped by the logic of platform economies.

City Opera situates itself in the tension between noise and opera. Opera has historically been associated with separation, hierarchy, and control, while noise has been dismissed as mere disturbance. In the performance, noise becomes a symptom of the social and political structures that shape who and what can be heard, and how public space is negotiated through listening. 

At a time of increasingly privatized listening and personalized sound environments, City Opera insists on the limits of our ability to control what we hear. We are never fully in control of our listening, and when we believe we are, that control may come at the cost of surveillance.

Libretto, composition, direction and performance: Matilda Tjäder
Performers: Angelina Petrovic, Frida Andrea Keita, and Marie Vedel 
Opera sung by Vanja Spolin 

Premiered at Lunds Konsthall, 2026, as part of the exhibition ‘Rose is a rose is a rose’ curated by Sara Rossling and Paula Ludusan Gibe

Supported by Region Skåne and Lunds Konsthall 





Stills from Maja Li Härdelin’s video documentation