... esse defectivum

The opera is based on the eight-part spoken poem “sei langsam zarte zeit ::” by Valentina Dsora.

The musical-performative staging unfolds as a series of tableaux that follow the internal architecture of the text: SYSTEM, ESSENCE, EMOTION are not acts in the traditional sense, but states of being—modes of existence that permeate music, movement, light, and voice.

The work follows an ontological dramaturgy. It stages the tension between function and presence, control and listening, optimization and fragility.

… esse defectivum responds to a contemporary condition in which human perception is increasingly shaped by algorithmic systems, optimization logics, and digital infrastructures.

Between promises of efficiency, acceleration, and constant availability, embodied experience, attention, and sensitivity are put under pressure.

At its core lies the question:

What forms of perception, relation, and presence remain possible when experience itself becomes functionalized?

The opera explores this question not from a distance, but as a physical and acoustic process.

This is where its social relevance emerges: In a time dominated by acceleration and control, the work creates a space for slowness and differentiated perception.

It opposes the logic of optimization with a practice of listening, attention, and embodied presence.

The project contributes to the further development of contemporary music theatre.

It brings together composition, sound art, language, and performative practice into a form that deliberately departs from linear narratives and instead focuses on states, transitions, and perceptual spaces.

The close interweaving of text, music, and body opens up new possibilities in the interaction of voice, sound, and сцене.

Through its collaboration with musicians from Ensemble Proton Bern and lecturers from the Bern University of the Arts, the project is both locally grounded and internationally connected.

Dsora’s poetic structures are translated into musical architectures:

repetition becomes rhythm, rupture becomes form, silence becomes material.

The score is conceived as a hybrid system in which composition, sound art, and embodied performance are inseparably intertwined.

The music does not accompany the text—it emerges from it.

Three musical logics correspond to the three linguistic registers of the libretto:

Systemic layer: recursion, loops, pulse, grid-based rhythms, machine-like vocality

Human layer: breath, fragile timbres, microtonal inflections, whispered and fragmented gestures

Liminal layer: the interaction of both through temporal distortion, hybrid vocal techniques, and erosion of form

Live electronics are not used as an effect, but as an ontological agent:

they intervene, distort, overwrite, loop, and occasionally fail.

They do not illustrate system failure—they enact it.