OperArkitekterne
MANIFEST
CREATING ALTERNATIVES
We want to create spaces for artistic work that are creative, safe, playful, and beautiful. Spaces for collective processes that generate meaning, foster collaboration, and make room for everyone to show up as whole human beings.
We share knowledge, experience, and resources generously. We strive to be transparent and authentic in how we create together. We know that creation is sustained through care: care for one another, for the work, and for the communities we are part of. By recognising our dependence on one another, we create conditions for deeper connection and shared responsibility. We believe that we become larger than ourselves through collective practice.
INTENTIONAL SAFETY AND SAFER SPACES
We insist on creating saferspaceswhere people can take creative risks without fear. Spaces where trust allows experimentation, and where play opens possibilities. We believe that diversity strengthens collective creation. The more perspectives, experiences, and ways of being a space can hold, the richer and more transformative that space becomes.
Clear frameworks create freedom. The more clearly a space is held, the more room there is for everyone within it. We seek to cultivate both collective and individual freedom grounded in mutual responsibility. We will actively protect these spaces. We will stand with one another in solidarity and help create environments where people can participate fully, as the complex and whole human beings they are.
MORE THAN THE SUM OF US
When we live, work, and create together, something emerges that is greater than any individual contribution. Collective creation is not just the sum of separate efforts. It is the making of something that could not have existed otherwise. To co-create is to create together. It is to make something that none of us could have created alone. Meaning emerges through our relationships, it is created between us.
WHEN WE SHAPE OUR OWN REALITY
We refuse to accept existing structures as the only way of working. Performers, musicians, technicians, artistic leaders, producers, collaborators, and audiences all have knowledge, perspectives, and creative agency to contribute. We believe it is possible to organise artistic work collectively and collaboratively, while making space for reflection, dialogue, and care.
How we work matters. Listening matters. Making time for one another matters.
We believe that collective work becomes stronger when we allow ourselves to rely on one another, when we embrace interdependence, and when we recognise that we stand on the foundations built by others before us.
PROCESS AND PRODUCT AS ONE
The way we create shapes what we create.
For us, process is not merely a path towards an outcome. It is an essential part of the artistic work itself. By prioritising process, we create space for genuine co-creation and shared ownership among everyone involved. The work that emerges belongs to all who have shaped it. It carries the traces of the relationships, conversations, risks, and discoveries that made it possible.
We are not only performers, artists, or workers. We are whole people. When we are able to bring more of ourselves into our working lives, creativity flourishes, and the artistic processes lead to more meaningful, relevant, and resonant work.
PART OF A MOVEMENT TOWARDS DEEPER INTERDEPENDENCE
We seek to create connection in a world otherwise shaped by fragmentation and isolation. We believe that relationships are a source of knowledge, meaning, and transformation. Through artistic practice, we seek out the kinships that already exist between us and use them to imagine and build new possibilities together.
We see our work as part of a broader movement towards deeper interdependence. A movement that recognises that our lives, our futures, and our flourishing are bound together. By building a culture of interdependence, we challenge systems that reward extraction, isolation, and competition. We create alternatives grounded in care, reciprocity, imagination, and collective responsibility.
Artistic work can do more than produce performances or cultural experiences. It can create shifts in how we relate to one another. It can inspire movements, generate momentum, and open space for futures that do not yet exist.
We believe that imagining other futures is a responsibility.
The paths towards them are not fantasies. They emerge wherever people gather to create, care, listen, and act together.
By shaping the ways we work now, we help shape the world that follows.
This is how we build a reality that is sustainable, connected, and alive.
OperArkitekterne
Rose Munk Heiberg, Conductor and Artistic Director