A new opera for four voices, santoor, piano & live electronics. Conceived and directed by Elli Papakonstantinou, this international co-production investigates parallels between today’s virtual reality world, fake news and Plato’s allegory of the Cave.

The Cave is a cyber punk opera on a popular theme Matrix. An oratorical opera in the intersection between opera, cinema and new technologies, this radical performance calls for critical reflection on fake news and post truth. It’s a contemporary reinterpretation of Plato’s famous “Cave” allegory. Shadow puppetry, new media, visuals and music are all performed in real time by a cast of four. Nothing is ever still. The Cave challenges the boundaries of contemporary opera, drawing from a variety of music genres. In the intersection of reality and fantasy, material & immaterial, with an emphasis on the exploration of self-truth. The staged transcription of the philosophical text is interwoven with intertextual adds – Buddhist sutras, hyperrealistic conversations etc.- and pinholes onto today’s world. Socrates is a robot’s voice and this sarcasm runs through out the piece. while mythological creatures pass as shadows of another world all too close to ours; In Plato’s allegory people are chained in a cave and they are facing the inside of the cave whereupon they see the shadows of the outside world. In so doing, they interpret “reality” through this optic of the shadows. The cave brings out how the two-dimensional vision of the three-dimensional life translates in today’s realities in misconceptions that we may have regarding what’s going on as for example in the domains of politics, of society and of course ethics.