Walls of Glass

Presentation

Walls of Glass is a new contemporary opera, composed by Thomas Nguyen, with a libretto by Lancelot Hamelin and staging by Mikaël Serre. The project is a contemporary reflection of Charlotte Beradt’s book The Third Reich of Dreams, which gathers dreams collected clandestinely from Berliners between 1933 and 1939, documenting how Nazi totalitarianism infiltrated even the unconscious mind. Lancelot Hamelin, who has spent over a decade collecting dream testimonies during moments of political upheaval, saw in Charlotte Beradt’s work a means of interrogating our current era.

This opera portrays two couples of New York intellectuals and artists who take part in a neuroscientific experiment blending dreams and politics, echoing the dreams collected in The Third Reich of Dreams. But this experiment will soon disrupt the lives of its participants… Indeed, dreams gathered under Nazism begin to resonate - not as equivalence, but as warning; with the mechanisms by which a “post-truth” cult seeks to root itself in the unconscious mind.

With his new original score, Thomas Nguyen seeks to question, from one extreme to another, the impact of music on our unconscious: positively, or negatively when music becomes a tool of manipulation, propaganda and anguish. More broadly, this opera is conceived as a place of exploration and transformation, of transgression and crossing of disciplines. It is designed as a subjective sound and visual experience meant to intensely stimulate the unconscious mind of an audience through its emotional and philosophical content.

Artistic Team

Walls of Glass’s artistic team shows a rare combination of interdisciplinarity and comes together in their shared interest in the subject of dreams. Thomas Nguyen (French) belongs to a generation of composers who move fluidly between classical tradition and contemporary sound worlds, and Walls of Glass promises to be a striking demonstration of this rare range. The composer partnered with author and playwright Lancelot Hamelin (French), whose decade-long investigation into dreams collected across cities like Nanterre, New York, Cairo, and Rome gives the project a sense of urgency and realism, and an almost documentary-like grounding. Director Mikaël Serre (Franco-German), also a performer and translator, will create the staging and visual world of the work, at the crossroads of theatre, opera and the visual arts. They are joined by dramaturge Katia Flouest-Sell (Franco-German), whose work moves between theatre, opera, novel writing, and translation across French, German, and Russian traditions. This spirit of dialogue echoes the identity of the Collectif Io itself, a company with a striking history of producing innovative interdisciplinary works, including Xynthia, l'Odyssée de l'eau (2022).

Co-producing Partners