NOW WE ARE EARTH / An Orchestra

A love declaration to the earth.

NOW WE ARE EARTH / An Orchestra is the futuristic vision of choreographer and theater maker Nicole Beutler. Performers, choir and audience come together in this eco-futuristic celebration of connectedness. With a team of 8 dancers/singers and a city choir of 45, this 100-minute piece will be like a happening of voicing and moving togetherness, dreaming up a possible future.

For the third and last part of the trilogy RITUALS OF TRANSFORMATION (towards a new humanity), we join forces with artistic partners from various countries, collaborating with the Berlin-based Dance On Ensemble, a company for dancers over 40, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen / VONK!, our Fast Forward partner and OPERA2DAY with their expertise in working with city-choirs.

The work is celebrating connectivity and balance between the five kingdoms: animal, human, plant, fungus and technology. NOW WE ARE EARTH promises to be a total work of art, a dance opera featuring a local city choir and the audience plays a significant role. Inspired by the endless and inextricable connections of fungal hyphae in a mycelium, the performers build a polyphonic resonating web full of colours and soundings, like an endlessly repeating and branching pattern.

NOW WE ARE EARTH / An Orchestra is inspired by the third phase of the alchemical process of the making of gold, the red phase, rubedo. After the destruction of the old world in GINKGO or: 56 million years ago there were palm trees on the North Pole (Part 1) and a period of recovery: ATMEN/ evolution is silently unfolding (Part 2), NOW WE ARE EARTH/ An Orchestra is an attempt at a new balance towards one new world.

In times dominated by doomsday scenarios, theater offers us the opportunity to envision a future for humanity on this planet. With the trilogy, Beutler offers alternative perspectives, looking beyond fear and promoting change, generating potential for healing with a hopeful vision for humanity on the planet. An experience of a new balance, is that a ridiculous fantasy or a visionary proposal?

NOW WE ARE EARTH/ AN Orchestra is a futuristic dream, a Monte Veritá of the future, a union of opposites. A harmonizing with the shared inexhaustible energy of the sun, an energy that is constantly present and never lost.

In the first week of February 2024 the second residency for this new production took place in the opera in Gent, with the full team of creatives and performers. The show will premiere in April 2025 at Opera Antwerp, after which we tour the work in the Netherlands and abroad. Keep an eye on the website for more information soon.

Hereunder photos of the residency in 2024 in Ghent, taken by Reinout Bos.