A novel production workflow and toolset for opera co-creation towards enhanced societal inclusion of people

Opera uses all the visual and performing arts to create extraordinary worlds of passion and sensibility. It is rightly recognised as a great achievement of European culture. And yet a form that once inspired social and artistic revolutions is often seen as the staid preserve of the elite. With rising inequality and social exclusion, many see opera—if they think of it at all—as symbolic of what is wrong in Europe today. This paper presents the technological and scientific approach of the European H2020 TRACTION project that aims to use opera as a path for social and cultural inclusion, making it once again a force for radical transformation. TRACTION wants to define new forms of artistic creation through which the most marginalised groups (e.g. migrants, the rural poor, young offenders and others) can work with artists to tell the stories that matter now. By combining best practices in participatory art with media technology’s innovations of language, form and process, the project is defining new approaches to co-creation and innovation, exploring novel audiovisual formats based in European cultural heritage, such as opera.