There is a certain ritual to going to the opera, I feel… you dress slightly better than usual, you arrive early, you find your seat, you sit down, and you give yourself to the whim of what the opera provides you with. The space is clearly defined: performers on stage, audience in rows, a polite distance between those who create and those who observe. When I went to La Divina Comedia at the Opera Graz, I expected as much but was pleasantly surprised.
The first half of the ballet didn’t take place on stage at all. Instead, it unfolded in the in-between spaces of the opera house: on the stairs, in the café, in the entry hall. Spaces that are usually transitional suddenly became the stage. There was also a physical closeness to the dancers that was usually not given. Movements that would normally be read as abstract shapes from afar became intensely human up close. Muscle tension, hesitation, effort and their facial expressions as a whole became much more visible. I was able to decide where I wanted to stand, when I wanted to move on and how close I wanted to be.
This relocation outside the traditional performance space created a strange intimacy. It felt slightly intrusive at first, and it visibly took people some time to adjust to these new rules, not sure what was allowed and what wasn’t. But that unsureness quickly turned into engagement. The opera house stopped being just a house and became a living organism (which is funny because the narrative of the piece was that we were inside of Dante’s body).
This shift kinda reframed the whole “going to the opera” experience. Usually, distance creates respect. You sit quietly and observe from afar. Here, respect came from closeness instead. You weren’t separated from the art, instead you shared the same space with it. It felt more human, more real, more personal.
When the second half moved back into the traditional setup (dancers on stage, audience seated) the contrast was striking. It felt like an entirely different play. Structured. Predictable. Nothing expected from me, the visitor, except of keeping quiet. And yet, because of what had happened before, the stage felt different too. More charged. More alive. Almost as if I was still as close to the performers as before.
The ballet itself was deeply captivating and emotionally overwhelming, but it carried an added layer of something.
This experience reinforced something I’ve been circling around for a while now: design is much more than graphics, print, or web layouts. Design is the orchestration of experience which seeps into almost all aspect of our everyday lives. In this production for example, choreography, lighting, costume, music, architecture, and performance were inseparable. None of them worked alone. Each element was designed in relation to the others, contributing to one cohesive emotional experience.
What moved me most was the realization that design can touch you without asking for interpretation first. There was no interface to learn, no instruction manual, no explanation necessary. The experience spoke directly to the body and only later to the mind. That’s something I rarely encounter in my daily design work.
I left the opera house with a quiet certainty: I need to go to more ballet productions. Not as a cultural obligation, but simply because I enjoy it.
