Caecilia Thunnissen
Caecilia Thunnissen is an award-winning stage director who specializes in staged concerts and opera. Her mission is to allow multidisciplinarity to flourish within the performer, to permanently free world, jazz, and classical music from their categorical confines, 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 for Opera of the Year by Place de l’Opéra), and Der flying Hollander Conducted by Andris Nelsons, with Anja Kampe as Senta. Drawing on her background as a dance dramaturg (e.g., for choreographer Nanine Linning at the Theater of Osnabrück, 2010–2012), her productions are characterized by a choreographic approach, with a strong physical component in her direction of the 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 centered on 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, the Dutch National Opera, and Philharmonie Luxembourg, won the YAMaward in 2020. In 2021, she made her successful debut at the Salzburg Festival with the staged concert schräg/strich, which was nominated for the YAMaward in 2022. In addition, 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 will continue its national tour through 2027.