After the Echo: Reflections on the Vox Project

The Vox Project: A Citywide Chorus of Connection

On October 11, 2025, opera spilled out of the theater and into the everyday pulse of Seattle. From storefronts to churches, from salons to cafés tucked behind Pike Place Market, The Vox Project transformed the city into a living, breathing opera house, one that celebrated the raw intimacy of the human voice and the stories it carries.

Conceived and directed by Rising Waters Collective’s co-founder Julia Benzinger, The Vox Project was part opera crawl, part artistic experiment, and part act of communal listening. Over the course of a single day, six unique interpretations of Francis Poulenc and Jean Cocteau’s La voix humaine unfolded across the region - each reimagined through a contemporary lens, each performed by a different artist, and each embedded in a distinct Seattle space.

A Day of Voices, Spaces, and Stories

The day began in the sleek glass storefronts of South Lake Union, where Vox: Halfway to Herself took place amid the buzz of a pop-up shop at HQ3. Passersby, lattes in hand, paused to find themselves pulled into a deeply personal world—a person on the edge of change, interrupted by a phone call from the past.

“It caught my attention as I was walking by and I just couldn’t pass by without stopping and enjoying it,” one audience member shared afterward. “The performer Heather Dudenbostel was fantastic. And it was fun to watch the other people walking by—it was sort of like a magnet. Everybody was mesmerized. I had a lot of fun just watching the other people’s reactions to it.”

Moments later, another audience member summed up the raw immediacy of the experience more simply:“That was f*cking awesome!”

This was the essence of Vox: opera meeting the public where they are.

Throughout the day, audiences traveled from one venue to another - sometimes by foot, sometimes by bus, sometimes by happenstance. Each stop offered a new voice, a new emotional landscape, and a new way of seeing how art could inhabit familiar places.

Reimagining an Iconic Work

At its heart, The Vox Project reinterpreted La voix humaine, a 1958 one-act monodrama by Francis Poulenc and Jean Cocteau. Traditionally a telephone conversation between a woman and her lover, the piece has long been a study of love, loss, and identity. In Vox, that conversation was expanded and refracted through multiple bodies, genders, and settings, asking:

Rising Waters Collective answered these questions by decentralizing the opera experience, both literally and figuratively. Performances were staged in six sites across the Puget Sound region, including HQ3, The Rabbit Box Theatre, First Church Seattle, ArtLove Salon, and two private residences for filmed adaptations. Each interpretation offered its own lens: one through queer faith, another through class and societal restraint, another through the quiet unraveling of memory.

By the end of the day, more than a dozen artists and community partners had helped bring this ambitious, citywide project to life.

Audiences as Witnesses and Participants

Unlike a traditional opera, there was no curtain, no orchestra pit, no clear separation between performer and audience. People stumbled upon performances as they might a street musician, or sought them out deliberately, following the schedule like an artistic treasure map.

At The Rabbit Box Theatre, deep inside Pike Place Market, Vox: The Echo in the Crowd turned a cabaret into a surreal reflection on technology and longing. Down the hall, the crisp clack-clack-clack of a cocktail shaker resounded as the protagonist (Lucy Weber) whispered confessions into an imaginary receiver.

“It was cool to see two different interpretations by two excellent artists—it was great!” shared one attendee who caught both The Echo in the Crowd and Vox: The Name is Missing at ArtLove Salon later that evening.

That spirit of curiosity, of wanting to see how one story could unfold a hundred ways, became the day’s through-line.

A Collective Effort

The Vox Project brought together 13 local artistssingers, pianists, directors, filmmakers, sound designers, and writers—alongside five community partners, from nonprofit organizations to small business owners who opened their doors to art.

Each site carried its own heartbeat:

• HQ3 South Lake Union – a bright, modern storefront transformed into a stage for rebirth and rediscovery.

• The Rabbit Box Theatre (Pike Place Market) – a subterranean cabaret echoing with conversation and bar patrons.

• First Church Seattle – a historic sanctuary that held Vox: The Sacred Between, where faith, forgiveness, and queer love intertwined.

• ArtLove Salon – a creative hub that invited audiences to step into a world of youth, loss, culture, and identity.

• Lairmont Manor (Bellingham) and a private Seattle home – intimate film settings exploring sacrifice, solitude, and the ghosts of memory.

Every performance, whether witnessed live or on film, extended the project’s central invitation: to listen differently.

The Sound of the City Listening

The impact wasn’t just artistic, it was communal. Dozens of people who might never set foot in an opera house found themselves transfixed by a singer and a piano in unexpected places.

Some lingered for minutes, others stayed for the full forty-five. Conversations blossomed between strangers. Artists and audiences alike spoke afterward of how visceral and human the experience felt- opera stripped down to its most essential form.

For many, it was a revelation that such depth of emotion could exist in a storefront, a salon, or a sanctuary.

As one audience member put it, the performances were “sort of like a magnet.”

Beyond the Curtain Call

The Vox Project also lives on through film. Two cinematic adaptations - The Hollow Between Them and eThe Art of the Inner Monologue - premiered online, extending the reach of the project to viewers across the country. Together, the filmed works drew 136 total views on the first day, a modest but meaningful milestone for an independent collective in its inaugural year.

Behind those numbers lies a broader story: Rising Waters Collective continues to model what community-rooted opera can look like in the 21st century. Through fair pay for artists, and partnerships with local venues and nonprofits, Vox stood as a testament to what’s possible when art and empathy converge.

Building Toward the Future

The success of The Vox Project marks the close of Rising Waters Collective’s first full-scale production, but it’s only the beginning of the company’s journey.

Season One, titled “The Human Voice,” continues in 2026 with Echoes of Her, a pilgrimage-style concert celebrating women’s voices across the Pacific Northwest, and the U.S. premiere of disPLACE, a Catalan opera on gentrification and belonging, presented in partnership with Theatre Off Jackson in Seattle’s Chinatown–International District.

For co-founder Julia Benzinger, Vox was both a creative milestone and a community experiment:

A Rising Tide of Gratitude

Rising Waters Collective extends heartfelt thanks to everyone who made The Vox Project possible: the artists who took creative risks, the venue partners who welcomed opera into their spaces, the community members who stopped to listen, and the supporters whose belief in local art helped bring it all to life.

To those who wandered in by accident and stayed to be moved, thank you for proving that opera is still, at its core, a conversation.

By the Numbers:

• 13 local artists paid

• 6 venues across Seattle & Bellingham

• 136 film views on the first day of publication

• Countless spontaneous audiences who stopped, listened, and felt something stir

A Final Note

Opera may have begun in royal courts and gilded theaters, but its power has always belonged to the people.

On October 11, 2025, Seattle heard that voice in unexpected places, and responded with laughter, tears, and the simple exclamation that summed it all up: