OperaGame is a compositional framework within The Playground Approach (ALP: Active ⇄ Attune Listening Playground). It grew from Reflexive Music and the listening its performance asks for. Through the recurring movements FIND – PLAY – SHARE – CREATE, individual contributions enter relationships and develop into a shared composition.

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The name joins two lasting interests. Opera offers the polyphonic scene, where many voices sound together and each keeps its own character. A game offers conditions and instructions to play with. In an OperaGame, I compose situations in which people listen, act, respond, and discover how their choices change what happens next.

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Reflexive Listening runs through the whole process: we notice our own contribution while staying attuned to others and to the place we share. Through Cross-Sensory Listening, something offered in one form can be taken up in another, so a dream, a food, or a game can return as sound, movement, or a stage action. When others take it up and develop it further, Cross-Sensory Communication begins.

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OperaGame gives these relationships time and structure to grow. Here Polyphonic Joining becomes tangible: distinct expressive lines meet in responsive relationships, each player keeps a particular voice, and the relations among the voices open what becomes possible.

The framework unfolds through four recurring movements:

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• FIND: Attend to what is already happening. Discover an action, sound, gesture, object, or relationship that offers a way in.

• PLAY: Explore what you have found. Repeat it, vary it, and hear what changes as you go.

• SHARE: Offer it to another person. Listen to how they respond and how their response changes what you are doing together.

• CREATE: Compose with what has developed, bringing contributions together so they open further play.

 

The movements keep circling. What we create becomes something new to find; a response can redirect the play, and sharing can reveal an unexpected possibility. Throughout, we move among the I–YOU–WE–WORLD perspectives: my contribution, yours, the relations developing among us, and the wider situation we inhabit.

 

Alice – Cafeteria OperaGame, commissioned by ExClaM! in November 2012, was an early large-scale realization. Drawing on the Mad Hatter’s tea party from Alice in Wonderland, I composed it for the communities of the Sibelius Academy, the Theatre Academy, and the Academy of Fine Arts as they prepared to become the University of the Arts Helsinki.

More than 500 people played it across the three academies’ cafeterias: students, faculty, cafeteria staff, cleaning personnel, and passers-by. It invited an emerging university community to meet itself through a composition, and familiar places and everyday routines became the conditions for listening and playing together.

 

In 2014, DREAM COOK JUMP, a City OperaGame, carried this exploration to the province of Overijssel in the Netherlands, with the Wilminktheater in Enschede, Odeon De Spiegel in Zwolle, and the Schouwburg Deventer. It began with a question: could we play with Overijssel as one neighborhood, one playground?

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Over the months of its development, people shared dreams, foods, and games through an online platform and in community encounters. They responded to challenges organized in four levels: find your favorite spot, share, inspire one neighbor, and create a perspective. Their contributions became material for the performances. Performers received tasks live through earphones, light, video, the positions of other performers, and the audience’s behavior, and within each task they chose the content they performed.

 

One question ran through the whole project: “What would make me feel at home in the theater?” It connected each person’s answer with a larger inquiry into how communities can make a home of their cultural spaces.

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These works brought the compositional questions of Reflexive Music into cafeterias, theaters, and neighborhoods. They also composed the conditions of participation: who can enter, what they can contribute, how their contribution is received, and what keeps the play going.

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OperaGame offers a framework for these questions at every scale, from a small group to a public performance. For me, composing community means working with the relationships among people, their expressions, and the places they share, listening for the whole while playing the moment we are in.