Oh, So Many Things To Feel Lost About (2026)
20-minute digital opera — Dutch National Opera & Ballet
So Many Things To Feel Lost About is a 20-minute digital opera following the journey of a lost glove after it falls into an Amsterdam canal. From this small everyday accident, two parallel stories unfold: one above the water’s surface and one beneath it, as the glove descends into an underwater world of currents, dreams and transformation.
The work draws on Amsterdam’s particular urban condition, taking the city’s position below sea level as a starting point for an opera set beneath the water. The ordinary glove — an object easily lost while cycling through the city — becomes the protagonist of an unexpectedly heightened operatic narrative. An insignificant everyday event is thus transformed into an operatic drama, allowing the conventions of the genre to be displaced onto an ordinary object and situation.
I worked as dramaturgist, music editor and visual artist, developing the visual language, dramaturgical structure and relationship between image and score. Drawing on an anthropological approach to opera as a cultural form, I examined its formal conventions, gestures, audience rituals and modes of theatricalisation. These conventions became material to work with: amplified, displaced and reconfigured to transform an ordinary everyday occurrence into a theatrical and operatic event.
Commissioned by Opera Forward Festival of Dutch National Opera, in collaboration with KABK and HKU Utrecht Conservatory.
The work draws on Amsterdam’s particular urban condition, taking the city’s position below sea level as a starting point for an opera set beneath the water. The ordinary glove — an object easily lost while cycling through the city — becomes the protagonist of an unexpectedly heightened operatic narrative. An insignificant everyday event is thus transformed into an operatic drama, allowing the conventions of the genre to be displaced onto an ordinary object and situation.
I worked as dramaturgist, music editor and visual artist, developing the visual language, dramaturgical structure and relationship between image and score. Drawing on an anthropological approach to opera as a cultural form, I examined its formal conventions, gestures, audience rituals and modes of theatricalisation. These conventions became material to work with: amplified, displaced and reconfigured to transform an ordinary everyday occurrence into a theatrical and operatic event.
Commissioned by Opera Forward Festival of Dutch National Opera, in collaboration with KABK and HKU Utrecht Conservatory.