Orito & Kuka

Presentation

The world appears to have ended. The only apparent survivors are Orito, a hyper-realistic Bunraku puppet, and Kuka, a 3.5-metre industrial robot arm once designed to assemble cars. Without reliable memories or context, they sift through a ruined landscape of sound, matter and fragmentary human voices, trying to understand what happened and what, or who, remains.

As Orito and Kuka learn one another’s languages, distinctions between living and non-living, organic and mechanical, body and instrument begin to blur. Kuka’s motors become song; Orito’s animated body gathers memories and histories. The human performers emerge as carriers of voices and gestures, partial presences rather than an explanatory chorus. Gradually, Orito and Kuka discover that what they mistook for the end of the world was the implosion of patriarchy: the collapse of an order built on hierarchy, control and fixed ideas about whose bodies, voices, forms of knowledge and kinds of labour matter. The world has not ended. Memories, sounds, beauty, joy and the possibility of new relationships have survived. The question shifts from “What happened?” to “What do we do now?”

Orito & Kuka: They Who Rebuild is a 90–105-minute feminist science-fiction opera inspired by speculative fiction and by the urgent need not only to critique inherited systems, but to rehearse other ways of living. A machine designed for productivity and exact repetition, and a puppet animated by human hands, become protagonists with agency, personality and musical presence alongside human performers. Together, they must decide what to carry into the future and what to leave behind.

Artistic Team

The artistic team for Orito & Kuka brings together artists and researchers from opera, music, puppetry, robotics, dramaturgy, fashion and stage design. Taiwanese-American composer and performer Stephanie Pan, Dutch-Peruvian librettist and director Lisenka Heijboer Castañón, German theatre maker and puppeteer Ulrike Quade, Dutch dramaturgs Maaike Bleeker and Jasmijn van Wijnen, Dutch-Surinamese fashion designer Denzel Veerkamp and German stage designer Hendrik Walther have been selected for the distinct perspectives they bring to the project’s central question: how can human and non-human performers share agency on the opera stage? Several members have long-standing artistic collaborations. Quade and Bleeker’s research into robotics as contemporary puppetry gives the project a rigorous foundation in embodied technology; Pan and Heijboer Castañón have previously created interdisciplinary music theatre together. Van Wijnen anchors the process in contemporary opera practice and the context of Dutch National Opera and the Opera Forward Festival. Veerkamp and Walther extend the project’s ideas of repair, reuse and transformation into costume, space and objects. Together, the team combines deep knowledge of operatic form with practices that challenge its conventions. Their complementary expertise allows Orito & Kuka to develop not as an opera decorated with technology, but as a work in which music, bodies, machines, materials and dramaturgy are created in genuine dialogue.

Co-producing Partners