Although the European Capitals of Culture for 2024 are in Northern Europe, Maltese talent has been in evidence in Bad Ischl in Austria through the work of Naxxar composer and producer Ruben Zahra.

His children’s opera Saltice – an hour-long fairytale of salt and ice – premiered earlier in the year as a flagship event for this European Capital of Culture.

A conceptually innovative and visually stunning piece of music, theatre and dance, it was inspired by the legends, salt mines and ice caves of the Salzkammergut region combined with the Zahra’s artistic vision for a striking modern aesthetic which uses pop-up paper sculptures, origami techniques and paper engineering.

“When I was invited to develop this project,” explains Zahra, “I already had an idea for a musical theatre production using origami and paper art as a major component”.

The composer said he had previously visited Tokyo and came across incredible paper art by Kaori Kato, an origami artist who specialised in creating geometric patterns and organic forms through hand-folding paper in both installations and as wearable art.

“I’d always been intrigued by origami but had only ever imagined it on a small scale as small animals,” he continued.

“However, when I began to research the field, I discovered a whole world of applied paper art and pop-up sculpture. Saltice seemed the perfect stage to bring these to life in a performance, as the city of Bad Ischl is known for its salt mines. White paper with clean folds and crisp structures seemed a great parallel for salt crystals.”

Although he had been to the Salzburg Music Festival many times, Zahra said he had never explored the wider Salzkammergut region of upper Austria.

“The landscape was breathtaking, with fairytale towns on glistening lakes, nestled between the mountains.

“The salt mines were incredible: giant chambers like underground cathedrals with long, cold, dark, damp tunnels where salt has been mined since the Neolithic period,” he said.

The production is a fairytale, written by German writer Susanne Felicitas Wolf, with ingredients drawn from the history and folklore of the salt mines and ice caves of the area.

It’s a story of two children, Katharina and Martin, whose family work in a salt mine harvesting rock salt, a precious mineral that plays an important role in the story. Their father is sick, and so they go on an adventure to find the flower of life with which they can save him, meeting several characters along the way.

A musical theatre production using origami and paper art as a major component

These include the villainous Bergstutzen with its serpentine body living in the lower elevations of the Alps – a kind of dragon which the children vanquished with rock salt– and a cave bear, a creature which really existed in the region’s prehistory.

“In fact, the bear wasn’t included in the first version of the script,” explains Zahra, “but when in 2022 I visited the giant ice cave of Dachstein Mountain, I learnt that they had found the fossilised bones of a prehistoric cave bear. This seemed like a wonderful opportunity for a character in our story and Susanne immediately agreed to write him in.”

For the staging, Zahra commissioned three world-leading paper artists: Kaori Kato from Japan, Peter Dahmen from Germany, and Polly Verity from Wales. Dahmen created five pop-up paper sculptures that were projected to constitute the backdrop scenography of Saltice.

Most of the costumes for the 13 dance students and three professional dancers were designed and created by Verity who specialises in the kinetic transformation of paper sculptures, such as skirts that fold and take on a new shape as the dancer goes into a handstand, paper flower hats that ‘bloom’ and the large head of a wolf that children animate on stage like a puppet.

Kato created eight origami red hats that are worn to create the serpentine aesthetic of the Bergstutzen.

Zahra composed the musical score for a children’s choir accompanied by a professional line-up of string quartet and percussion. With its strong contemporary aesthetic, the story was brought to life with this music, paper sculptures and dances, choreographed by Silke Grabinger.

It’s an entrancing and inventive modern approach in which the narrator is the backbone of the piece.

Interestingly, there are no actors playing the two children on the quest, giving the audience the freedom to place themselves into the quest in their imaginations.

Saltice has already been featured on Austria’s public television channel ORF and is now ready to start touring internationally.

Interestingly, “the entire staging, costumes and set are designed for ease of transportation”, smiles Zahra.

“They all fit in a single suitcase along with my clothes (as long as I wear the thick ski jacket, I need for the ice caves on the aeroplane!).”

Saltice is expected to come to Malta in 2025. One can watch the whole performance on Zahra’s YouTube channel youtube.com/user/rubenzahra.