Michel van der Aa returns to the Holland Festival with the Virtual Reality opera From Dust. The six singers of the Sjaella ensemble vanish and reappear in a cloud of particles, as if each other’s doppelgangers and alter egos. The events are also tailored to the audience’s reactions through the use of AI and in this way explore the boundaries between identity and reality.
Michel van der Aa
12-29 June
Muziekgebouw
Surreal landscapes. Endless walks through patches of mist in which singers appear and then disappear again. Are they the same woman? Or does she break down into countless alter egos, like the particle cloud she’s made up of? They guide you through an otherworldly realm that seems to defy gravity, with towering edifices that could have been designed by Salvador Dali, but which also mirror back the memories you hold.
“My interest in doppelgangers and alter egos is rather evident in all my work,” says composer Michel van der Aa, whose dreamlike, nearly plotless virtual reality opera From Dust is featured at the 2025 Holland Festival. The first performances took place in December 2024 at Rotterdam’s De Doelen, during the Immersive Tech Week. The work won the grand prize of the Cannes film festival’s Immersive Competition in May 2025. Returning visitors of the Holland Festival surely remember his 2019 VR opera Eight, which takes you through the different stages of a woman’s life in reverse order, from older to young.
You can recognise the female figures in From Dust as the six singers from German vocal ensemble Sjaella. “Their appearance and vocal lines are loosely based on the Big Five personality model, which distinguishes five personality traits,” Van der Aa says. “Is someone extraverted or introverted? To what extent is someone open to new experiences? Is someone agreeable, conscientious and emotionally stable?”
The six-singer vocals and five personality types were also the basis for writing the music, which can be either poppy, electronic or abstract. And its “colour can change” depending on the path the audience takes through the work.
This influence of the audience on the story has become more important for him in recent years. “While making Eight, I found that perhaps the craziest thing about VR and all these other immersive media experiences is that it’s actually the audience who is the work’s protagonist. I wanted to take this one step further. This is why we’re using artificial intelligence in this new experience, so as to tailor the music, visuals, sounds and events to the audience as much as possible. I wanted it to be essential to the story.”
Shyness, feeling deeply, intimacy
Without giving away any spoilers, what it comes down to is that visitors will have a preparatory onboarding interview where they answer a few questions and provide visual descriptions. The AI then makes its own version from one of the twelve versions of the narrative’s story blueprint, almost in realtime. The result: “A personalised opera that’s very much about you.” When you put on the VR headset and the experience starts, the six avatars of the Sjaella singers invite you to interact with the work on an even deeper level: “They look at you, follow you with their eyes when you move. You can touch things, play them. The world is one made ‘from dust’, a mutable cloud of particles where touch and movement in effect constantly activate new storylines.”
His goal was for them to take you on a journey. “When do you feel like the singers are singing for you especially? This is at the heart of the piece, and it brings about all kinds of things. Shyness, feeling deeply, intimacy.” On the technical and musical aspects he wanted to explore with From Dust, he says: “How do you make a human figure you can relate to without it becoming uncanny or overly abstract?”
He discovered Sjaella by chance one day. “I think I saw a YouTube video of them singing Purcell, and I was hooked immediately. They’ve been singing together since their teens, and it sometimes sounds like they’re singing with one voice. That was exactly what I was looking for.” Together with his regular dramaturge Madelon Kooijman, he chose texts by female poets like Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Ada Limón, Louise Bogan and Ingrid Jonker, which they rewrote as five abstract song lyrics about flux and becoming, and the search for who humankind is in a world where everything is fluid and elusive. “And Fernando Pessoa, of course, the godfather of heteronyms, which were all offshoots of himself, and would sometimes even have a conversation together.”
His interest in doppelgangers goes beyond mere mirror images, alternative versions or offshoots of one person: “It’s a way for me to get inside the head of a lead character and shape an internal dialogue. I sometimes do this by using samples and mixing these with something being played live at the same time. This draws you into the interior monologue of music, essentially. But it’s also possible in a more personified way. In my first multimedia opera One (2002), Barbara Hannigan sang a duet with a video alter ego that completed her thoughts and musical phrases. My last film opera Upload (2021) is about a man who has a digital upload of himself made.”
The world of VR as a protagonist
“I’m always busy with the question how technology affects our lives and what this does with us as humans. But what I also discovered while making From Dust is that we shouldn’t use technology to copy our life. Virtual unreality is actually far more interesting than realism. Making things that are impossible in real life. This turns the world of VR into a protagonist as well, so it’s about how you feel during this walk, in these spaces where the ordinary laws of nature don’t quite seem to apply.”
“With all digital technology I use, I also ask ethical questions. I don’t always know the answers. Using artificial intelligence, we were able to make the From Dust experience more personal and individual, but not without first also asking what this would mean for visitors’ privacy. We then developed a system that could be run locally, where the data would be deleted automatically afterwards and so would be entirely independent from the major big tech companies from the US. The same goes for AI’s energy consumption. I feel it’s very important to also look at these tools with regards to privacy or the climate.”
His next film opera is already in the making. Theory of Flames is expected to premiere next year and explores themes like the transience of information and conspiracy theories. Once again, technology is the common theme connecting human and experience: “A lot of people see the world from behind their computer screen now, and this in turn makes me think of Pessoa, who most liked watching people on the street through his window. I’m greatly triggered and inspired by both the positive and negative sides of taking part in the world through the power of thought. It’s also about dreaming, and the question whether it’s even possible to get away from modern media technology. Every cool bar on every remote island can be found on Google Maps. While people used to simply draw dragons on maps to indicate uncharted oceans. You could say I’m looking for that kind of escapism in all my work.
-
Dana Linssen is a philosopher and writer. She is a film journalist for NRC and teaches film at ArtEZ and the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht.