Lore Lixenberg, PRÊT Á CHANTER™

For 60 minutes, the ordinary rituals of urban life — ordering, waiting, paying, flirting, apologising, complaining, negotiating, misunderstanding, must take place without speech. All orders and conversations are made through vocalisation: song, hum, grunt, whistle, bark, moan, ululation, invented language, animal sound, operatic excess or sonic failure. The café continues to function, but under another law. Prices are set according to creativity. A soundtrack of previous cafés, voices and Raspberry Pis leaks through the room like a memory of service culture after speech has collapsed. PRET A CHANTER™ is an analogue hack into corporate urban life: part café, part opera, part social experiment, part warning. Entering means accepting the rules. Speaking is antisocial. You may be filmed. Toilets are on the right.

PRET A CHANTER™' is a political work (Opera) as in 'Politi' the life of the city. It is a post-internet, post-cyborg real-time opera that seeks to blur the boundaries between art and life, vocalisations (including singing in multiple and invented different languages but no speaking), different cultures, different economic and post-economy systems and different psychologies.

'Pret a Chanter' is an analogue hack into the gentrification of the city, a reclamation, an alternative universe running according to the laws of string theory, alongside corporate colonisation, a space with no space.

Anyone who steps over the threshold of 'PRET A CHANTER™' must abide by the rules of the opera. Anyone who enters 'PRET A CHANTER™' must succumb to the experiment that is opera.