The Hamburg State Opera will present “Opera and Animation,” a festival exploring the forms of animation in musical theater, from Nov. 6 to 8, 2026.

Produced with Metropolis Cinema and VRHAM!, the Biennale for Immersive and Digital Art in Hamburg, the festival includes three premieres at different venues. They range from analog and live animation to digital visual worlds and a multimedia fairy tale production.

The festival opens Nov. 6 with Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” staged as a live animation cinema by director Nils Voges of the artist collective sputnic. Inspired by the silhouette films of Lotte Reiniger, the production creates an animated film on screen in front of the audience, with the singers animating characters and images as they perform. The evening begins at Metropolis Cinema with Reiniger’s “Carmen” and “Papageno,” accompanied by live music from the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra, before the premiere at the Opera Stabile.

On Nov. 7, the collective 1927 presents Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” and Ravel’s “L’enfant et les sortilèges” in a production by Suzanne Andrade and Esme Appleton that combines animated sets, acrobatics, music, and song. The staging is a transfer of a co-production between Komische Oper Berlin and Deutsche Oper am Rhein. In cooperation with VRHAM!, the State Opera foyer will also host the digital installation “The Golden Key” by New York artists Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser, as well as an open motion capture workshop titled “Let the Avatars Sing” on Nov. 7 and 8.

The festival closes Nov. 8 with Humperdinck’s “Sleeping Beauty” in a multimedia production by Anna Bergmann, a co-production with the Thalia Theater Hamburg. The staging combines opera, animation, video, acting, dance, and puppetry, and features actors from the Thalia Theater. Markus Poschner and Bergmann’s musical adaptation adds music by Weber, Gounod, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev, along with songs by the Spice Girls, Madonna, and Cher. That afternoon, Metropolis Cinema will screen Reiniger’s 1926 film “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” with live music from the orchestra, and “Dido and Aeneas” will receive an additional performance.

“Following a focused ‘Macbeth’ to kick off the season, our ‘Opera and Animation’ festival now showcases the playful side of opera – this most intelligent spectacle in the world! Animation opens up new spaces for images, narratives, and audience interaction in musical theatre. With ‘Opera and Animation,’ we want to demonstrate the diverse artistic possibilities of this connection – from live animation and the fusion of acrobatics and analog visual worlds to a multimedia reinterpretation of a fairy tale. The result is a festival that examines opera from different perspectives and simultaneously explores how musical theatre can be told and experienced today,” said Tobias Kratzer, artistic director of the Hamburg Staatsoper.