Caecilia Thunnissen
Caecilia Thunnissen is an award-winning stage director specializing in staged concerts and opera. Her mission is to allow multidisciplinarity to manifest within the performer, to permanently free world, jazz and classical music from their categorical boxes, and to dissolve the distinction between art for adults and art for children. The spatial and physical performance style in her productions serves as her antidote to an increasingly digital, non-physical world.
Caecilia has directed three striking semi-staged operas with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, including Wagner’s Lohengrin featuring Klaus Florian Vogt and Camilla Nylund (nominated Opera of the Year by Place de l’Opéra), and Der fliegende Holländer conducted by Andris Nelsons with Anja Kampe as Senta. Drawing on her background as a dance dramaturg (e.g., for choreographer Nanine Linning at Theater of Osnabrück, 2010–2012), her productions are characterized by a choreographic approach, with a strong physical component in the direction of performers.
Since 2015, she has served as the artistic director of Oorkaan in Amsterdam, an internationally recognized organization dedicated to creating staged concerts for new and young audiences. She developed the Oorkaan Method, a unique approach to staging concerts driven by music, with musicians as the sole focus on stage. Through the Oorkaan Academy, she trains and coaches musicians to become multidisciplinary performers. Her production Tickle, an international co-production between Oorkaan, Dutch National Opera, and Philharmonie Luxembourg, won the YAMaward in 2020. In 2021, she made her successful debut at the Salzburg Festspiele with the staged concert schräg/strich, which was nominated for the YAMaward in 2022. Additionally, since 2018, the family concert Romeo & Juliet — a collaboration between Oorkaan, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Concertgebouw Amsterdam — has attracted over 41,000 visitors and continues its national tour through 2027.