Exploring weak opera: care, multiplicity and listening in RISE year 3 (2022–2023)

Contemporary opera increasingly draws on sophisticated technology, expanding its aesthetic possibilities while intensifying the ecological costs, institutional hierarchies and technical infrastructures involved in its production. RISE (Reflective Iterative Scenario Enactments), a five-year research-creation project at Concordia University, responds to this condition through experimental mini-, micro- and nano-operas. Focusing on RISE Year 3 (2022–2023), this article draws on Gianni Vattimo’s notion of weak thought to propose the concept of weak opera: an operatic practice that loosens strong forms of authorship, narrative, technological mastery and institutional authority. Through close readings of the four Year 3 works, the article argues that care, multiplicity, consent, vulnerability and listening function as compositional methods rather than thematic additions. Handle with Care: Values in Our Hearts, Heart Tethers, Lento and Waste Whisperer articulate, respectively, weak form, weak technology, weak temporality and weak materiality. Together, these works suggest that opera remains viable for a wide range of artists and performers not by preserving inherited forms of mastery, but by cultivating relationality, interpretative openness, ecological responsibility and collective listening.