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The set is made of painted cardboard Four performers grab clothes from a large pile and feedback emanates from a guitar off to the side Television sets flicker on and off A performer sings, or perhaps declaims, an aria of collaged texts about community service in a slippery, atonal scale In the background, another performer lip-syncs in a mirror, while the others stalk around the set, painting and fiddling, entranced by the gestures their own bodies can make As he finishes, the cast comes together to ‘sing’ the remainder of the text while waving racing flags This is a scene from Object Collection’s Problem Radical(s), performed at PS122 in 2009 In this piece there is text, there’s music, there are actors, but where do ‘narrative’ and ‘character’, de facto, some would say essential, aspects of theatre, fit into this?   There has always existed a stylistic flux at the heart of opera, and the ever-fluid interplay between composers, patrons and audience has pushed this hybrid genre into many permutations over the years These days, due to the mounting cost of opera production and diminishing audiences, major opera houses tend to stick to the tried and true, and a commission for a young composer is quite rare Active since 2004, Object Collection is one of the groups pioneering new ways of interfacing music and theatre, a forum for the operatic and yet an exercise in the genre’s fluidity   Founded by composer Travis Just and director Kara Feely, Object Collection mounted their first original piece in 2005 While music is central to their practice, their decision to describe their works as opera is practical as well as aesthetical Feely says they ‘started calling them operas in 2007 or 2008 Partly because it’s difficult to try to describe to different producers and presenters what we’re doing exactly We’re trying to do this very intricate, precise theatre thing, but there’s a huge music component to it as well, and they’re in balance So sometimes when people from a theatre background see the show they don’t realise that there’s a score’[1] Genre confusion runs in both directions: ‘But also then, from the music