Veronica Janunger runs Suitcase Opera, the small and flexible opera company. This flexibility allows the opera company to make opera as an art form available to a wider audience without this audience having to travel to large opera houses. 

When I call Veronica for the interview, she is deep in the middle of editing videos to be posted on the Ålidhem Church's social channels. Since last autumn, she has been substituting as a parish educator and working mainly with the church's music & children's activities, in parallel with developing her company Suitcase Opera. The pandemic has hit the performing arts & music industries hard and so has Suitcase Opera's operations. All projects from 2020 were postponed or cancelled and the situation required new solutions while creating time for planning. 

What is Suitcase Opera?

Suitcase opera is the small and flexible opera company that performs in new and sometimes unexpected places and that with simple means gives the audience a musical and emotional experience, says Veronica Janunger, founder of Suitcase Opera.

By running a smaller opera company with a smaller ensemble, smaller props and a flexible set design, we can go to and perform opera in places that larger companies cannot. Large institutions do large and resource-intensive productions that cannot put on their shows just anywhere, which is where we, being small and more easily located, can come in as a complement and make opera more accessible to all.

Veronica herself was born and raised in Örnsköldsvik, and since her hometown has no opera house, she had to travel to experience the art. It was her great love for opera and classical music as an art form and her drive to make it accessible to more people that led her, together with her friend and then colleague Esther von Schoenberg, to start Suitcase Opera. 

I fell in love with opera in my first encounter with it. It was when I saw Ingemar Bergman's The Magic Flute when I was 6 years old on TV. My mother recorded it on videotape and I watched it every week for at least a year,' says Veronica.

With the flexibility of the company, it is the acoustics that determine where Suitcase Opera can perform. Veronica explains that they can perform in anything from garages or homesteads to barns or offices and classrooms, as long as the acoustics allow. We have even performed opera outdoors, but then with the support of microphones, Veronica says. 

In the spring, she is participating in the eXpress programme with the aim of developing the company into an operation that can offer different types of performances all year round and that has performances that can go on tour, mainly in Västernorrland and Västerbotten. The hope is that the business and its larger projects can resume by the summer of 2022, but if we are lucky, we will experience some tasters as early as 2021. 

If you missed opera, why should you go see a performance? 

My favourite quote I think explains it so incredibly well: "Opera is where we go to exercise our emotional muscles." Opera is about life and all that it entails - love, sadness, joy, jealousy, humour, life and death, everything. Opera as an art form is so good because it contains so many different elements, music, theatre, text and the visual, so there is always something in it that can speak to you," explains Veronica Janunger.