After the forced closure of many businesses and facilities, it’s exciting to finally hear that many of the places closed are now reopening with extra safety precautions set in place. It feels like a fresh start, one that we’ve been craving for months.
A Barcelona, Spain opera house known as the Gran Teatre del Liceu, or simply the “Liceu,” has recently reopened after being closed since mid-March due to the pandemic. However, when it reopened last month to play its first show in three months, things were a little different. Instead of a full audience of humans, the opera house filled its 2,292 seats with several plants, which all came from local nurseries.
This may be bizarre news to you. However, there’s a deeper meaning behind the plant audience.
“After a strange, painful period, the creator, the Liceu’s artistic director and the curator Blanca de la Torre offer us a different perspective for our return to activity, a perspective that brings us closer to something as essential as our relationship with nature,” read the opera’s website.
But not to worry: the idea behind adding plants to the audience wasn’t to completely replace human opera house-goers. The Spanish facility just wanted to temporarily fill up the large amount of empty space in their building to make the lack of humans less saddening and the inside of the opera house a little more aesthetic.
And, yes, the Giacomo Puccini “Crisantemi” performance was still able to be enjoyed by humans as well. The Liceu held a live stream for people to watch from home.
And I’m pretty certain the plant audience was able to get some sort of enjoyment out of it as well. After all, they say soundwaves are supposed to be good for plants in terms of boosting their immune systems and helping them grow faster.
I’m all for the plant audience. And even better: all 2,000-plus plants will be donated to health care professionals at the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona as a little thank you gift for all of their hard, strenuous work during the pandemic.
Hopefully when things are safer, the Liceu will be able to welcome an in-person human audience back once more, even if it has to mean wearing masks and sitting six feet apart. In the meantime, I’m sure the opera house will have more live streams planned to keep people entertained from the safety of their home.
Check out the plant-filled opera house below. It looks simply stunning!
