There are works that do not merely occupy the contemporary stage, but reorganize its internal physics. They do not ask the audience to follow a plot, nor do they rely on the machinery of emotional identification; instead, they reorganize perception itself, inviting listeners to inhabit a space where sound becomes an organism, time becomes a viscous material, and the boundaries between body and environment dissolve into a single metabolic field. Tiko Gogoberidze’s Cactus, premiered on 22–23 November 2025 at Haraki Theater in Tbilisi, belongs unmistakably to this category.
The opera does not “stage” transformation; it enacts it. It behaves as a living system: growing, accumulating, saturating, shedding, radiating. It opens like a geological stratum and closes like a breathing aperture. And through its forty minutes of continuous metamorphosis, it articulates a vision of human consciousness caught between the rigid temporal architectures of modern life and the slow, vegetal temporality of an organism that simply persists.
The Stage as a Mechanism of Duration
The production team constructs an environment that feels less designed than engineered: a chamber that resembles an elevator, a cube suspended between mechanical possibility and metaphysical implication. Set designer Mariam Songhulashvili crafts an interior where surfaces behave like membranes rather than objects; light ricochets along the edges with the quiet intensity of laboratory equipment.
Achi Arghanashvili’s lighting sculpts time itself into visible substance — thin sheets of radiance, sudden compressions, long tidal glows. Uta Bekaia’s costumes function like temporal skins, shifting between the everyday, the ceremonial, and the biomorphic. Above all, the space is designed as a resonant chamber: the theatre becomes a diaphragm, and Lasha Natenadze’s sound direction turns it into an organism that inhales and expels frequencies with startling tactility. Nothing here exists as decoration; the entire visual field behaves as a single temporal device.
The Architect Enters Time
The opera begins before the opera begins. The Architect — portrayed with weight and self-quieting intensity by Giorgi Goderdzishvili — emerges from the audience as a contemporary figure: a man from the street, still carrying the residues of daily time. His initial transformation is not symbolic; it is biomechanical. The act of removing ordinary clothing and adopting the sharp black suit registers less as costume change and more as entry into another temporal order — the measured order of human control.
The libretto by Mindia Arabuli opens not with story but with philosophical recitative: an essay on temporal consciousness delivered as vocal architecture.
The Architect reflects on humans as creatures perpetually trying to outrun duration, as if time were a conveyor from which one cannot step aside. “Despite all efforts,” he states, “man is not a fish.” A simple phrase, yet one that charges the entire opera with a kind of ecological irony — not as contradiction, but as a tension between modes of existence. Inside the elevator, he recites creation as if indexing the sedimentary layers of civilization: mammoths, agriculture, viruses, pterodactyls, the invention of God, the desert, cities, Lego bricks. It is a catalog of the world as a sequence of emergences. Then he presses a button. The cube malfunctions. And time fractures.
Sonic Metamorphosis: The Opera as Resonant Organism
The earliest musical fragments reveal Gogoberidze’s approach with remarkable clarity. The score is not built from themes or motifs; it is constructed from states of matter. Each sonic layer behaves as a substance: porous, granular, metallic, vaporous, dense. Timbre replaces narrative. Texture becomes dramaturgy. Where a traditional opera would use harmony to articulate emotion, Cactus uses density.
Where others would use melody for character, Cactus uses resonant pressure. The initial musical condition is almost translucent: a lightly breathing spectrum of whispered noises, faint mechanical whirrs, microtonal particles that flutter like dust motes. The sound feels pre-conscious, as if the opera begins before hearing fully awakens. Then the texture thickens. Not suddenly, but like humidity rising in a sealed room. The clarinet — played with extraordinary restraint by Christopher Manning — enters not as an instrument but as an organism. Manning’s sound is vegetal, almost mineral: a timbre that feels grown, not performed. It shimmers at the edge of pitch, occupying a zone between breath and resonance. This is the Cactus: not character, not metaphor, but frequency.
Crucially, whenever The Architect sings, the clarinet bends in distorted ripples. Human voice produces turbulence in the sonic environment; the vegetal voice responds with elastic instability. It is one of the most elegant dramaturgical gestures of the opera: an acoustic economy in which every human utterance reshapes the ecology of sound. Later fragments contain even denser material: episodes where the clarinet’s tone expands into a resonant cluster, almost choral in its harmonic bloom; sequences where the score descends into thick, dark, pressure-filled droning, the musical equivalent of geological compression; passages where noise behaves like weather — sheets of sonic wind, fractures of static, slow tectonic grinding. These textures never function as effects. They function as states of being. The opera’s structure is a metabolic cycle: emergence → condensation → saturation → release. And the music makes this cycle palpable as a physical condition. The sound does not accompany drama; the sound is the drama.
The Attacks: Time as Physiological Event
The malfunction of the elevator throws The Architect into a series of attacks — states where breath becomes unstable, movement unravels, and perception multiplies into a swarm of images. Arabuli’s text fractures into syllables, spasms, geological metaphors, pseudo-mythologies. The body becomes a landscape; panic becomes a mineral. Each attack corresponds to a new mask: these masks behave like externalized organs, as if the body requires new anatomical tools to survive the pressure of subjective time. Throughout these scenes, the Cactus emits a steady, almost liturgical frequency. A green light glows. The air trembles slightly. The clarinet stabilizes the space the way a tuning fork stabilizes a string.
In the second attack, The Architect imagines himself dissolving into ore and re-emerging as oil millions of years later — a metaphor of time so overwhelming that it disintegrates the distinction between geology and psychology. In the third, silence arrives. The Cactus withdraws its resonance. Unable to tolerate this void, The Architect produces noise, cacophony, raw sound — a desperate attempt to provoke a response. He fails. The silence persists. And only when his resistance collapses into exhaustion does the Cactus begin to resonate again. It is a subtle but devastating lesson: the vegetal temporality of the Cactus will not be coerced by human agitation. Only a porous, receptive body can tune itself to a frequency older than fear.
Toward a New Operatic Ecology
CACTUS expands the grammar of contemporary opera by treating sound as a metabolic entity and stage space as a resonant interior. The work does not rely on contrast; it relies on gradients, intensities, densities. It shapes perception without didacticism, guiding the audience into a state where listening feels like a form of participation in an organism’s growth. The achievement belongs equally to every component: Gogoberidze’s score — an ecosystem of spectral pressure and organic resonance; Arabuli’s libretto — part philosophical treatise, part geological delirium; Korkashvili’s direction — a choreography of time rather than bodies; Songhulashvili’s scenography — a space that behaves like a cell; Bekaia’s costumes — temporal garments; Arghanashvili’s light — an instrument; Natenadze’s sound — the circulatory system; Manning’s Cactus — a thing that breathes; Goderdzishvili’s Architect — a man who fractures and reassembles in real time. This opera grows. This opera metabolizes. This opera resonates long after silence returns. It is a reminder that contemporary music theatre, at its most essential, does not seek to entertain or instruct — it seeks to reorganize the very conditions under which we perceive time, breath, sound and self. And in CACTUS, time discovers its voice, the body discovers its permeability, and the cactus — that quiet, ancient, undemanding organism — learns to sing.
Review by Ivan Nechaev
