Poznań Grand Theatre to Premiere 'Art of War' Opera

By Elena Vasquez

The Grand Theatre in Poznań, Poland, will premiere a new opera, "Art of War / Sztuka wojny," on Nov. 20, 2026. Maciej Henel-Celis composed the music. Beniamin Bukowski wrote the libretto.

Tobiasz Sebastian Berg directs and choreographs the production. Its central conceit is stark: war staged as a contemporary art exhibition. A perpetrator of violence appears as the Artist. War itself appears as the Curator. Acts of destruction are presented as artistic achievements.

The premise carries a trap for the spectator. As the performance unfolds, the audience gradually discovers that it has become part of a system that turns violence into something admired rather than condemned.

Who shaped the work?

The creative team did not build the opera alone. It invited 30 young people from Poland and Ukraine to join several months of artistic laboratories. The labs covered dramaturgy, movement, music and the participants' own perceptions of war. Their input directly shaped the work's artistic language and structure.

The team also traveled to Kyiv for 10 days of documentary research and workshops. There they worked with:

• Ukrainian war veterans
• Young people and students
• Members of artistic and social communities, including people associated with the Theatre of Veterans in Kyiv and the Kyiv National Operetta

Why young voices?

Berg framed the project's origin in a single question, sent in correspondence with OperaWire: "We began with a fundamental question: Why are young people, who will live with the consequences of today's wars for decades, so rarely invited to participate in public conversations about them?"

The question explains the casting of the creative process itself. Rather than staging a finished statement about war, the team recruited the generation that will inherit its aftermath and let their testimony bend the dramaturgy.

How will the audience sit?

The staging abandons conventional opera seating. Spectators sit on two sides of a narrow performance space. The design resembles a military tent, an art gallery and a runway at once — three settings that map onto the production's three frames: combat, curation and spectacle.

The runway image is the sharpest of the three. It positions the audience as witnesses to a show in which destruction walks past as an exhibit.

What does the premiere signal?

The Nov. 20, 2026 premiere places a Polish-Ukrainian co-created work on one of Poland's major opera stages while the war in Ukraine continues. The piece arrives with documented input from Kyiv veterans and youth communities, not just symbolic dedication — and it tests whether an opera house can implicate its own audience in the aesthetics of violence.