Earthrise

Stage visuals for Contemporary Renaissance Music Theatre

Technique

stop motion, 3D animation, cutout animation

Materials

historical woodcuts, etchings and maps, dry plants

Duracotus and Fjordhilde travel to the moon, a scene from Johannes Kepler's THE DREAM

Projected video work for music theatre based on the astronomer Johannes Kepler's science fiction novel The Dream. Earthrise unfolds as a dream in a dream in a dream (including a journey to the moon) showing how important it was for Kepler to supplement scientific facts with means that expand the principles of science: fiction, visual arts, music, and the holistic thinking of his folk healer mother Katharina Kepler, whom he defended when she was tried as a witch. The visuals try to bring to life the Keplers’ mental world by collaging and animating images of the time, and expanding them into our era by combining cut-out and 3D.

Premiered 17 October 2024 at Finnish National Opera, Helsinki

TEAM

Earthrise tells of a world losing its mind. In the year 1624 (or 2024) while political and religious forces fight for influence, scientific research unravels crucial data that calls into question our way of thinking about our place in the universe – and we react with nothing but confusion and embarrassment.

With his science-fiction novel The Dream, the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) tried to advance a new worldview by speaking to his readers’ imaginations: what would our world look like if seen from the Moon? Kepler suffered in his struggle against dogmatism. He even needed to defend his own mother Katharina Kepler (1546–1622) in a witchcraft trial. However, he never ceased to believe in the secret harmony governing the world; a harmony we experience only through the sciences and the arts.

Inspired by the lives of Johannes and Katharina Kepler, the music theatre work Earthrise combines 17th-century compositions with genre-bending new music by composer Juha T. Koskinen and vocal artist Anni Elif Egecioglu. The libretto for this work is devised by writer-director Aleksi Barrière. Cembalist Marianna Henriksson invites music by Kepler’s contemporaries such as Capricornus, Galilei, Scheidt, or Harant to enter a dialogue with this music of our time.

Earthrise is based on Johannes Kepler’s The Dream (posthumously published in 1634) and the astronomer’s life. Kepler saw fictional writing, visual arts, and music as useful devices that could illuminate science and expand its methods and audiences. He was also inspired by traditional practices and intercultural exchange. Although he didn’t acknowledge it until later in his career, a deep influence came from his mother Katharina Kepler, who was versed in natural medicine.

Earthrise unfolds as a chain of dreams and associations, inviting perpetual shifts of perspective so necessary in our time. Through international collaboration, multiple art forms and musical voices weave together, not to create the biography of a man but rather a thought-experiment for the senses.

3D Globe based on an edited and colored map from 1594 by astronomer and carthographer Petrus Plancius, one of Kepler's contemporaries.

3D stage setup test for cosmic sequence, based on the stage floor plan

recording of the show with the same, edited sequence for a piece by Romanus Weichlein

Animated part of the "Carta Marina" by Olaus Magnus, 1539

Because of the many storytelling levels and heterogeneous source materials in the text and music, it felt important to find a unifying language for the projected visuals, that fill and define the space throughout the piece. Kepler’s time was one of mass-production of images through the industrialization of woodcuts: the world was flooded with cheaply produced images more than ever before, for political and religious purposes, like nowadays spreading both facts and exaggerations, superstitions. It was a tool of indoctrination, but Kepler also felt it was an incredible opportunity to spread knowledge and make science more concrete to a broader audience. He consumed that kind of material himself, such as modern maps of the world, and sought to produce strong visuals in his own work. We are using a lot of historical source material to bring his world closer to us, but also finding a freer inspiration to create an original visual language that feels like the piece itself: not a museum but a living collage, that allows for new associations to be born.