Opera house performs first post-lockdown concert for an all-plant audience

Next week, Barcelona’s Liceu opera house will emerge from its lockdown-induced siesta by throwing a concert to a rather unusual audience. The attendees will not need masks or gloves, nor will they be required to follow physical distancing rules.

However, they might like to take along a nice comfy pot and some water to prevent their roots from drying out as a string quartet serenades them, fittingly, with Puccini’s Crisantemi (Chrysanthemums).

A total of 2,292 plants will occupy the venue’s seats and listen to the opera house’s first post-lockdown concert when it reopens next Monday. Non-vegetal music fans will also be able to enjoy the performance as it will be live-streamed.

According to the Liceu’s artistic director Víctor García de Gomar, the Concert for the Biocene, played the by Uceli quartet, is intended to help us ponder the current state of the human condition and how, in lockdown, we have become “an audience deprived of the possibility of being an audience”.

For Eugenio Ampudia, the conceptual artist behind the concert, the project will serve to reflect what has happened across Spain and around the world as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced people to retreat from shared public areas.

“At a time when an important part of humankind has shut itself up in enclosed spaces and been obliged to relinquish movement, nature has crept forward to occupy the spaces we have ceded,” said Ampudia.

After the concert, the plants will find themselves in a new home, with each one of them being donated to 2,292 health workers as thank you for their efforts over recent months.

—

“the first rule of opera is the first rule in life:

see to everything yourself.”

-nellie melba

—

photo and story credits: the optimist daily