NOA (New Opera Action) – contemporary alternative opera and interdisciplinary art festival, which gave rise to Operomanija movement in 2008. Crossing the borders of traditional opera and searching for interdisciplinary crossings, the festival declares freedom, collective creation, openness to diverse ideas and forms of cooperation. Uninhibited by any framework and unwilling to restrict itself via topical, temporal or format references, the festival mostly presents world premieres of diverse productions.
In 2008 NOA was launched as a short opera festival – the first and so far the only platform in Lithuania dedicated to contemporary new opera. The first five festivals were held on an annual basis and were distinguished for their intense programming – each festival presented 5-6 new productions of contemporary music theatre, along with creative workshops and guest performances from abroad. Soon the creators have outgrown the short opera form and starting from the third festival, NOA was presented as contemporary opera festival. In 2012, due to drastically cut funding required to organise the 5th NOA festival, creative teams were proposed to try their hand at the nano-opera genre, i.e. to create very short operas with duration of several minutes; this festival was followed by a sarcastic manifesto distributed by Operomanija, expressing the creators’ views towards the situation.
During the first five years of the NOA festival the operations were conducted based on the creative laboratory principle. This period was marked with highly productive experiments, over 30 premieres of contemporary music theatre works and an increasing amount of international touring. Therefore, after 2012 it was decided to hold the festival less frequently – to slow down the pace of work, making it more focused. However, it shall be emphasised that the principal concept and objective of the NOA festival have remained unchanged from the very first event – it continues to present new works, premieres of the new music theatre produced by Operomanija.