GAIA-24. Opera del Mondo is a work that treats the stage as planetary terrain rather than theatrical container. Created by composers and directors Illia Razumeiko and Roman Grygoriv with Opera Aperta, the piece expands music theatre to a scale rarely attempted. It is not about ecology; it behaves ecologically. Structures grow, collapse, entangle and recombine. Voices blend with environmental sound. Bodies interact with landscapes that are not metaphorical, but rooted in the lived reality of war-scarred Ukraine.

The work unfolds as a geohistorical opera that weaves together ritual, ethnomusicological research, contemporary dance and live instrumental performance. What makes the piece so arresting is its refusal to separate the political from the mythological. Ecological devastation, cultural memory and wartime trauma coexist within a dramaturgy that feels both ancient and sharply present. The performers move as if guided by tectonic forces rather than conventional psychology. The vocal writing stretches across extended techniques, guttural rawness, folk inflections and choral intensity, creating a sonic palette that feels carved out of earth itself.

The scenography pushes this further. Designed as a living environmental system, it shifts between excavation site, battlefield, cosmic void and ritual ground. It is not backdrop, but responsive organism. Light interacts with dust, shadows behave like actors, objects take on an almost animistic agency. The performers inhabit this environment not as characters, but as agents within an unstable ecosystem. The dramaturgy unfolds less as narrative progression and more as a choreography of forces: gravity, resilience, erosion, resistance.

GAIA-24 draws heavily on the duo’s long-term ethnomusicological research, integrating vocal lineages, dances and ritual forms from across regions affected by conflict and imperial histories. This is not aesthetic sampling; it is a deeply embodied practice. The work becomes a meeting point of cultural timelines: premodern, postmodern and post-catastrophic.

The jury was particularly struck by the piece’s ambition and vulnerability. Several jurors felt an aching frustration at not experiencing it live, its scale, its proximity to performers, its environmental detail. They noted its conceptual urgency: a work that does not merely comment on planetary crisis, but stages crisis as lived experience and collective inheritance. The opera’s ability to hold ecological, political and cosmological dimensions simultaneously speaks to a field that is expanding its ethical horizons.

What makes GAIA-24 resonate so strongly is the sense that it is not simply an artwork, but a cultural intervention. It suggests that opera, once associated with imperial grandeur, can be reimagined as an urgent site of planetary consciousness. The piece feels carved out of necessity. It does not ornament environmental grief; it confronts it. It does not aestheticise conflict; it bears witness to it while imagining how ritual might rebuild meaning in its wake.

GAIA-24 is music theatre as seismograph, registering the tremors of a world in collapse and the fragile, persistent forces struggling to remake it.

GAIA-24. Opera del Mondo is a contemporary geohistorical opera by Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko. The project is based on exploration of the results of destructive human activities on the global ecological situation, and particularly Russian invasion in Ukraine. GAIA-24 searching new ways to speak about ecology on a music theatre stage, find new performance, body, voice, music methodologies and develop “extended” scenography that can connect human body, theatrical space, and surrounding “cosmos” in terms of natural, cultural and political environment. The opera was premiered in Kyiv and performed in Rotterdam, Vienna, Venice, Berlin, and Zaporizhzhia during 2024 – 2025.

Libretto, dramaturgy and scenography
Illia Razumeiko

Music and direction
Roman Grygoriv

Producers
Olga Diatel
Volodymyr Burkovets

Costume design
Kateryna Markush

Director of photography
Denys Melnyk

Live electronics and live video
Olena Shykina
Valeriia Vynohradova

Lighting
Svitlana Zmieieva

Sound director (recording)
Andrii Nidzelskyi

Traditional dance choreography
Olena Dudka

Contemporary dance choreography
Olena Mesheriakova

Ethnomusicological research
Marichka Shtyrbulova
Yuliia Vitraniuk

Assistant director
Yuliia Parysh

Stage manager
Iryna Onishchuk

Artists involved
Marichka Shtyrbulova
Yuliia Vitraniuk
Sofiia Pavlichenko
Kateryna Hordiienko
Karolina Muzychenko
Akim Zvarych
Oleksandr Chyshii
Oleksandr Yavdyk
Dariia Bohdan
Dariia Hordiychuk
Danylo Zubkov
Kateryna Bysheva
Olena Mesheriakova
Alisa Kuznetsova
Aik Yehiian
Serhii Shchava
Tetiana Chukhno
Roman Grygoriv
Illia Razumeiko

Artists in the video
Evhen Bal
Kateryna Hordiienko
Marichka Shtyrbulova

Production
Opera Aperta
proto produkciia

Support
Goethe-Institut
Ukrainian Emergency Art Fund

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