OPERA AS A HEALING PROCESS & CEREMONY
Returning to the healing roots of art
This path began in 2021, during a visit to the Sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidaurus.
Standing within that ancient landscape, I felt a call: not to recreate the past, but to remember and gradually reactivate something of the healing consciousness embodied by the Asklepieia.
The Asklepieia were among the most important healing sanctuaries of ancient Greece. Health was not approached through the body alone, but through the whole human being. Purification with water, movement, nourishment, rest, prayer, ritual, dreams and the arts belonged to an interconnected process of care.
At Epidaurus, healing existed alongside music, sacred ceremony and theatre. Art was not merely entertainment. It could create the conditions for catharsis, reflection, inner movement and transformation.
This understanding awakened something that had long existed within my own journey as an opera singer.
Opera unites voice, music, theatre, poetry, movement and visual art. It also carries within it the memory of ancient tragedy. I began to imagine opera not only as performance, but as a contemporary ritual space: a place where the arts could meet therapeutic practices and serve the human being as a whole — body, heart, mind, soul and spirit.
The pandemic as a wake-up call
The pandemic became a profound threshold, both personally and collectively. It interrupted the speed of ordinary life and confronted humanity with fear, isolation, grief and uncertainty.
It also opened an unexpected space for introspection.
We were invited to look within, to meet what had remained unheard and to reconsider the way we relate to our health, one another and the Earth. The crisis revealed how urgently we need a more conscious and integrated understanding of wellbeing — one that includes our emotional, relational, spiritual and collective life.
As I wrote in my article Inner Peace after the Pandemic, the external crises of humanity are inseparable from our inner state. When balance begins to be restored within the individual, something also begins to shift within the collective.
From remembrance to performance
From this inquiry, I created two performances.
Judith became a call to spiritual remembrance and awakening. It was not conceived as an escape from reality, nor simply as an experience of relaxation. It invited the spectator to look within, to question, to open their own “Pandora’s box” and to encounter what was asking to be seen.
Alma continued this path through the journey of the soul — its origins, its wounds, its transformations and its longing to return home.
In both works, I explored how opera could move beyond representation and become a living process. Voice, music, movement, symbolism and holistic practices came together to create a space in which performance could also become reflection, ritual and an invitation toward healing.
I was searching for a contemporary echo of the Asklepieion: a place where the arts could once again unite in service of the human soul.
From “listen to me” to “I am listening”
After the performances, audience members began asking whether it was possible to work with me more personally.
Their questions revealed the next step of the path.
I began to descend from the stage.
I moved from “listen to me” toward “I am listening.”
Rather than remaining inside a role or asking to be admired from a distance, I became increasingly interested in meeting the person before me — in listening deeply to the voice beneath the voice and discovering the inner world that wanted to be expressed, regulated, remembered or healed.
This encounter, soul to soul, gradually became more meaningful to me than the distance between performer and audience.
The artist did not disappear. Her tools changed direction.
The voice was no longer only something to present. It became a way of listening, connecting and returning home.
The path today
Alongside this transition, we created Enosis, a therapeutic sound ensemble founded on the meeting of voices, instruments, vibration and collective presence.
Today, my work is increasingly devoted to the therapeutic path through voice, sound, breath, deep listening, nervous-system regulation, meditation, embodied awareness and ritual.
These practices are not an attempt to reproduce the ancient Asklepieia literally. They are part of a living inquiry inspired by their wisdom: how might we once again approach health as a relationship between body, heart, mind, soul, spirit, community and nature?
My intention is to allow something of that ancient field to be remembered — slowly, responsibly and in forms that can speak to contemporary human life.
Opera as a Healing Process & Ceremony is therefore more than a single performance or project. It is my own path of return: a return to the deeper purpose of the voice, to the healing origins of art and to an understanding of creativity as an act of connection and care.
A movement from the stage to the human being.
From performance to presence.
From “listen to me” to “I am listening.”
