In 2025, Oslo Fjord Opera Festival will embark on a unique collaboration with the Oslo Philharmonic orchestra and choir. Together, we will create a unique audiovisual experience of Verdi’s Requiem, interpreted by the international awarded director Tilde Björfors and costume and set designer Maja Ravn. Tilde Björfors is the founder of Swedish Cirkus Cirkör and has been a driving force in developing the European contemporary circus movement as well as blending circus with various art forms.
Verdi’s Requiem is one of the most beloved works written for vocal soloists, choir, and orchestra. In Verdi’s time, it was rarely performed in churches, as it was considered too operatic and dramatic. Although it is a mass for the dead, the music takes us through life and death, light and darkness, hope and despair. In a turbulent time of war and natural disasters, with this Circus Requiem we aim to highlight both the beauty and the difficulty of being human. Oscarsborg, which has an important role in Norway’s wartime history, takes on a new meaning now as the world faces renewed militarization. We need the hope-giving and healing power of culture now more than ever. This performance will also appeal to a younger audience. New scenic expressions and generationally transformative experiments are essential for bringing together a broad and varied audience, and this initiative is precisely that.
The circus moves between the existential extremes of risk and possibility, laughter and death. As we watch the acrobat ascend to breathtaking heights, we sit in suspense, fearing a fall, only to be freed by laughter at our own human frailties reflected in the clown’s mirror. To interpret Verdi’s masterful mass for the dead, with its sweeping voices and tones, through the physical language of circus—a form that taps into the immortal within us—offers a depth we eagerly anticipate exploring and bringing to life.
We live in a time marked by the presence of death, with many lives lost to war and conflict. The natural world is changing at a frightening rate: life in the oceans, glaciers, rainforests, and countless species are vanishing. Verdi’s dramatic Requiem honors the dead, but it also reflects layers of loss, grief, and longing for those of us who remain. Boundaries blur. Through song, the beyond becomes present within us—a helping hand reaching from the other side, encounters unfolding in the spaces between. The acrobats, with their gift for making the impossible possible, give us hope of immortality and a touch of the superhuman as they defy gravity, balancing on a thread-thin rope above the audience.
Opera and circus are two equilibristic acts that demand years of daily training and discipline. The artists’ practice is almost a ritual, a prayer for immortality. You pour your soul, countless hours, and physical sacrifice into performing a seemingly unnecessary trick. And perhaps, in that very act, meaning itself is born.
