YUM! to Have World Premiere at Bregenzer Festspiele
Composer Wen Liu leads a cast including Johanna Rusanen, Emmi Kauppinen, Adrian Autard and Henry Neill.
On 20 August 2026, Studio M.A.R.S. will present the world premiere of YUM!, a new experimental XR music theatre production. The creation is set to open at the Bregenzer Festspiele, a world-renowned opera and music theatre festival, as part of its 80th anniversary.
YUM! is a music theatre experience that blends opera, performance art, and extended reality into an immersive spectacle. Set in a world that is both grotesquely exaggerated and unsettlingly familiar, it explores the collision of luxury and scarcity, beauty and decay, satire and reality.
Composer Wen Liu invites the audience to take part in a decadent dinner where humble jellies are transformed into glittering gourmet fantasies through an XR app. Pleasure reveals itself as a deceptive illusion, reflecting the artificiality of digital realities, consumerism, and growing social inequality. By fusing augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality along with live performance, YUM! creates a dystopian atmosphere shaped by climate catastrophe, food insecurity, and collapsing social systems, leaving audiences with a lingering taste of the present in all its bitterness and allure.
YUM! is conceived, written and composed by Wen Liu, who also leads the artistic direction and XR concept. Stage direction is by Carmen C. Kruse, with dramaturgy by Anke Rauthmann, stage, props and costume design by Lisa Horvath, XR concept and design consultation by Flavia Mazzanti, and XR and 3D CGI design by govar GmbH. Soloists Johanna Rusanen, Emmi Kauppinen, Adrian Autard and Henry Neill perform alongside Ensemble Studio Dan.
Opera through the lens of XR
At the heart of YUM! is a dramaturgical use of Extended Reality, not only as a visual effect but as part of the story. Some audience members experience the dinner through XR devices, while projections reveal what they see to the wider audience. Characters photograph, filter and frame the event on their phones; their images become part of the scenography. The result is an immersive, satirical world in which screens act as both tools and façades, exposing the tension between what is real, what is performed and what is consumed.
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