TRACTION (Opera co-creation for a social transformation) was a three-year EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation action that ran from January 2020 to December 2022, coordinated by Vicomtech and with a total budget of roughly €3.75M. The project set out to do something deceptively simple: take opera, an art form often perceived as elitist and inaccessible, and turn it back into a vehicle for social and cultural inclusion, by giving marginalised communities the tools to co-create opera performances alongside professional artists.
That ambition was tested in three very different places: the inner-city neighbourhoods of Barcelona (Raval), a youth prison in Leiria, Portugal, and the rural communities of Ireland. The technological backbone of the project was a pair of digital platforms developed at Vicomtech and CWI: the Co-creation Space and the Co-creation Stage.
My Role
My main contribution was to the Co-creation Stage, the real-time distributed performance tool that allowed a single opera to be staged simultaneously across multiple co-located venues, synchronising live video, audio and interaction between stages. I was involved across the full lifecycle, in a role that combined technical development with research and partnership activities:
- Development: working on both the frontend and the backend of the Stage, contributing to the low-latency adaptive media transmission layer that made synchronised live performance across venues possible.
- User-requirements gathering: working closely with the artistic partners, Liceu in Barcelona, SAMP in Leiria, Irish National Opera in Ireland, and with sociologists and community educators to translate what professional artists and community participants actually needed into concrete software features.
- Evaluation: designing and running usability studies and field trials, collecting and analysing feedback, and feeding findings back into the design and development loop.
- Partner engagement: maintaining ongoing dialogue with consortium partners across research, opera, education and prison-work organisations in five countries, bridging the gap between technical decisions and the realities of the artistic and community use cases.
The Co-creation Stage was the centrepiece of the live-performance moments: a production could be co-presented from a main opera house and from community sites at the same time, dissolving the traditional boundary between professional stage and audience or participant.
Tech Stack
The Co-creation Stage is a real-time distributed performance application:
- Frontend: Angular with TypeScript, designed for multi-venue operator interfaces and audience-facing views.
- Backend: low-latency adaptive media transmission to synchronise live video and audio across geographically separated stages in real time.
- Deployment: containerised services orchestrated to support live events with strict latency requirements.
The companion Co-creation Space, the asynchronous collaboration platform built mainly by colleagues, used a different stack (Node.js / TypeScript / Express backend; React / Redux frontend; PostgreSQL + MongoDB for storage; AWS S3 + Elastic Transcoder for media; WebSockets for real-time notifications) and was designed for the ongoing creative process between live events.
Outcomes
By the end of the project, the two tools had supported three full community opera productions across eleven locations, engaging over 1,300 non-professional artists, reaching more than 8,000 live audience members across six languages, and registering more than 20,000 user interactions on the platforms.
- In Barcelona, La Gata Perduda was performed twice at the Liceu Opera House to sold-out audiences in October 2022, with a choir formed from twelve amateur choirs from the Raval. The Catalan public broadcast reached around 766,000 viewers. The TRACTION project page for the Liceu trial documents the full co-creation process behind the production.
- In Leiria, O Tempo (Somos Nós), produced with SAMP and the young inmates, their relatives and prison workers, was performed four times in June 2022: twice inside the prison and twice at the Gulbenkian's main concert hall in Lisbon.
- In Ireland, Out of the Ordinary / As an nGnách became the world's first virtual reality community opera, co-created with rural teenagers and toured around the country.
Survey data from participants reported that 94% felt actively involved, 89% learned from others, and 75% reported improved well-being.
Social Implications
What stayed with me long after the project finished is what the technology enabled rather than what the technology was. A platform for sharing videos, comments and audio clips is, in pure software terms, not a remarkable thing. But put it in the hands of a teenager in a juvenile detention centre who has spent years being told their voice does not matter, and the same software becomes a way to record a song that ends up performed at the Gulbenkian concert hall in front of their family. Put it in the hands of a migrant choir in Raval, and it becomes the connective tissue of an opera that fills the Liceu.
That is also where the responsibility of the technical role becomes very tangible: every design choice, what is private and what is shared, who can comment on what, how reliable the upload is on a tablet on a slow connection inside a prison, has consequences that go far beyond a usability metric. Building software that is going to be used in those settings requires a different kind of attention than building software for a generic "user".