Borealis 2026 closes with a world premiere from masters of sharp-witted humour, linguistic curiosity, and unconventional stage storytelling: Spreafico Eckly and Matteo Fargion — Franz (Purgatorio XXVII–XXXIII).

Franz places us in a familiar yet uncanny scenario: we encounter a group of people facing a task and dealing with artificial intelligence along the way. We step into a liminal-setting — a brainstorming session about a performance within the performance itself — in which the artists try to find their new opera's central theme.

Drawing solely on the libretto, and setting aside all aspects of staging and music, an AI chatbot offered the following summary:

“In this opera, Stella, Giorgio, and Kevin are joined by Franz, a new actor who keeps questioning their assumptions, to prepare a show about the Garden of Eden. They derail into arguments: is Eden a deserted paradise, a haunted new suburb, a missed farewell between two travellers, or a marketing image of perfection? Between jokes, lectures, misquotations, folk songs, and Beethoven echoes, brainstorming itself becomes the drama: a playful, bittersweet portrait of how humans wrestle with the idea of a perfect world.”

Blending folk song, familiar classical music quotes, and parlato (an expressive speech delivery hovering between speaking and singing), Franz sits between philosophy, drama, and opera, in which exchanges of perspectives become performance; storytelling merges with process; and the spectacle we are witnessing on stage turns unexpectedly messy, human, and profound.

In this performance, Spreafico Eckly and Matteo Fargion explore how language behaves, how stories twist, and how humans use words to make sense of what resists sense.