Artist : Alexandra Hallén
[ music theater ]
Time :
Wed • 19:30 - 20:15 (world premiere)
Thur • 17:00 - 17:45 (free entry)
Location : Åbne Scene, Godsbanen
Performance by : Alexandra Hallén & Jacob Bloch
An electric opera where unreciprocated love unfolds in motion. A bass singer runs throughout the performance as breath, endurance, and longing shape the music.
Info about the piece
Me & Stjärna is a 45-minute electric opera for bass-baritone Jakob Bloch Jespersen and the character Stjärna, a naïve “fairy horse” suspended between fantasy and reality. Stjärna appears as both companion and projection: an imagined being who carries the weight of someone else’s longing. The opera unfolds as an unreciprocated love story. Jakob is deeply in love with Stjärna, while Stjärna believes they are simply friends. This asymmetry drives the work: longing without resolution, desire without alignment. The emotional imbalance is not resolved through narrative climax but sustained through repetition, persistence, and physical effort. The stage is structured by three treadmills, creating continuous motion throughout the performance. Jakob sings while walking and running, allowing breath and physical exertion to shape the musical form. Tone destabilizes, phrasing shifts, and emotional vulnerability intensifies through movement. Endurance becomes dramaturgy; exhaustion becomes texture. The body does not illustrate emotion, it produces it.
Instead of traditional scenography, video projections generate shifting visual environments that expand and fracture the stage space. The performers inhabit a moving terrain where intimacy, fantasy, and misunderstanding unfold simultaneously. Reality and imagination overlap without clear borders. Musically, the opera integrates live voice with electroacoustic elements and processed vocal textures. The sonic world stretches between raw breath and mediated sound, amplifying the instability of the relationship at its center. Physical motion becomes a generative force within the music, shaping rhythm, tension, and progression from within rather than from imposed structure.
Me & Stjärna explores the fragility of projection and the human need to be seen, asking what remains when love is directed toward someone who does not understand it. The work lingers in the space between devotion and illusion, where desire continues even without response, and where movement persists even when connection does not. The work is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and the Danish Composers’ Society.
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Alexandra Hallén (1988) is a Swedish-born, Copenhagen-based composer working across opera, performance, and experimental music. Her practice centers on the body, not as metaphor, but as an active force within sound.
She creates works in which movement, breath, and physical exertion shape musical form, allowing physical action to function as compositional structure rather than illustration. Rather than relying on traditional narrative structures, Hallén often builds dramaturgy through sonic and bodily progression. Voice, repetition, and sustained physical states become generative forces.
In her recent works, performers inhabit tension, endurance, and motion as musical material, blurring distinctions between score, action, and presence. Her works have been presented at festivals including SPOR, KLANG – Copenhagen Avantgarde Music Festival, Radikal Jung (DE), and Unerhörte Musik (DE), as well as internationally in Cairo and Seoul.
She has collaborated with ensembles such as Scenatet, Esbjerg Ensemble, Ensemble Mosaik and Destructfuld Ensemble. Hallén studied composition at Hochschule der Künste Bern and The Royal Academy of Music Aarhus. Across formats, from opera and installation to concert and film, Hallén investigates how music can unfold as a physical trajectory rather than a fixed structure, asking how sound can be experienced as shared movement in space.
Among several awards, she has won The Danish Composers’ Society Music Prize for her artistic work as a performer (cello) within contemporary music.
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Astrid Kjær, co-founder of the theatre company AniMaNi, serves as consultant in the development of Stjärna’s physical and visual expression. In recent years, she has established a strong artistic profile as a puppet maker and performer, most recently in the youth production Fishtaile.
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Jakob Bloch Jespersen is a Danish bass-baritone working across contemporary music, opera, and experimental performance. He collaborates with composers and ensembles in Denmark and internationally and is known for his strong physical stage presence and willingness to engage in vocally and physically demanding works.