L’Opéra Distrait is the latest edition of L’Opéra Discret. Some twenty emerging artists from Brussels and beyond are in a two-week residency at Brasseries Atlas to collaborate on a performance event on Saturday, June 13, and Sunday, June 14, starting at 4 p.m.Drawing from a variety of disciplines : sound art, clowning, costume design, language, visual art, choreography, magic, and singing, the artists form a rhizome, like a collective of dissident neurons. They make distraction a principle of composition and dispersion a form of resistance.

The brewery spaces are transformed into an immersive scenography, interwoven with performative pieces and installations brought together like a choreography.Replaying and subverting the codes of opera as the stage of an immersive game. L’Opéra Distrait is a total art experience, questioning distraction in the era of a fragmented attention economy.As Claire Bishop conceptualizes in Disordered Attention, smartphones and social media have upended the old model of attentive observation, giving rise to new forms of perception, and here, questioning our ways of viewing and creating Art and Performance today.

L’Opéra Discret was founded in 2022 on the initiative of Garance Debert, who had been invited to Fondations 312 (a pop-up art space in Brussels) to organize an event centered on contemporary performance. Following the same concept, some twenty artists took over the foundation’s spaces to create an opera in complete discretion. Role-playing, whispers, and grotesque figures set the Brussels performance scene abuzz.

Now supported by the FWB, the Discreet and Distracted Opera has become a must-attend event for professionals and enthusiasts of unconventional performances. It is also an opportunity to highlight the buildings and the life of the Atlas Brasseries, a staple of the Brussels underground scene for over eight years.