Now is the Time for Monsters

Presentation

The Time of Monsters is not an opera with a linear story, but a visual and musical experience built around one central question: what do we do with the “monsters” of our time — the fears, disruption and confusion of a world that is changing fast?

The title refers to a phrase by the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born — now is the time of monsters.” That line is about times of transition: moments when the old no longer works and the new has not yet taken shape. BVDS recognises our own era in it, in which technology, climate and identity are all in flux.

Three sources of inspiration shape the work:

• Hildegard von Bingen (12th century): a mystic, composer and visionary who described visions full of fiery, hybrid beings. She did not see these beings as literal monsters but as signs — the Latin word “monstrum” in fact means “warning” rather than “monster”. Her music and visions are the historical starting point of this opera.

• Yōkai (Japanese folklore): spirits and apparitions that are not simply good or evil, but arise at the edge of human understanding. BVDS researched this in 2024 during a residency in Japan (Kinosaki International Art Center).

• Chöd (Tibetan Buddhist ritual practice, 11th century): not fighting your fears, but symbolically “feeding” them in order to transform them. This idea — not driving a monster away but letting it in — is the emotional core of the piece.

The artistic vision: monsters are not enemies, but messengers. By giving them a voice and a body, instead of pushing them away, room is made for something new.

Artistic Team

Now is the Time for Monsters is made by a team that has been circling the same questions from different disciplines for years: what happens to a body when it is dissolved, multiplied, scanned, sung, masked or offered up — and what remains recognisably human on the other side. The core artistic team consists of the Dutch artist duo Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot, video artist Rodrik Biersteker, costume and mask designer Lotte Goos, and Belgian composer Liesa Van der Aa. They were not assembled around a concept that already existed; the concept grew out of what this particular constellation of people can do together. The Nederlandse Reisopera brings the operatic infrastructure — orchestra, voices, touring capacity, a large and geographically dispersed audience — to a group of artists who have spent their careers working at the border between performance, visual art and digital image-making. What connects these five artists is not a shared discipline but a shared instinct: that the human figure is not a fixed thing, and that art has always known this — long before anyone had a game engine. Boogaerdt and Van der Schoot have spent twenty-five years dissolving and reassembling the body on stage. Biersteker builds the real-time worlds in which that dissolution can happen live. Goos makes the physical objects that become those worlds' inhabitants. Van der Aa writes the sound in which they can be recognised as monstrous, sacred and funny at once. Each of them has worked at the edges of opera without belonging to it; the Nederlandse Reisopera brings them inside it, with the scale, the voices and the audience that this material deserves. The result is a production in which the digital dimension is not an addition to an opera but the condition under which the opera exists.

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