Opera companies have developed and debuted numerous immersive productions over the years, adding a live singing element to these larger-than-life digital projects and installations.
There are artist collectives in Japan, New York, and London experimenting with high-tech ways to create all-encompassing artistic experiences through recorded visuals, music, and even scents. A project featuring Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes is currently catching on like wildfire around the globe. have witnessed traveling immersive Van Gogh productions and been enraptured by the larger-than-life projections of sunflowers and landscapes in recent years. Immersive performances and installations are hardly a new phenomenon, but these marriages of art and technology are experiencing a cultural moment. “You really got a sense that you were actually there.” “It was incredibly emotional for me, and for everybody, I think,” says Blake, also an opera fan. The film was projected onto all walls of the space and attendees’ ponchos, literally “immersing” them in the opera. Opera Parallèle then projected the finished film to audiences of 150 each in a white room at San Francisco’s Z Space performing arts center, providing attendees with white ponchos to wear during the opera. The end result was a moving graphic novel with all-caps text lettering that looked something like a Marvel comic book, but with animated faces that moved as characters sang. To capture the horror and drama of the climbers’ experiences, Opera Parallèle used motion-capture technology to film opera singers performing the vocal parts and then combined the footage with graphic-novel-like illustrations by Mark Simmons and digital animations by Sam Clevenger. That’s huge!” says Brian Staufenbiel, the company’s creative and stage director. Opera Parallèle’s post-show surveys revealed that about 43 percent of attendees had never been to an opera before. “I’ve watched opera from a distance - it was lovely, beautiful - but this was everywhere.” “I’ve never been to an opera where I felt I was part of it, really in it, feeling it, seeing it,” Blake says. Rather than placing singers on a stage, the opera projects pre-recorded video and sound all around the performance space to break down the barrier between stage and attendee and fully wrap the audience in the experience. The one-hour project tells the story of three of the climbers involved in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, when eight mountain trekkers died in a surprise blizzard as they descended from the summit. What’s it like to be on the world’s tallest mountain? “Endlessly glorious, endlessly exciting,” says Pippa Blake, a retired ski-academy administrator from Victoria, B.C., who in 2007 traveled to Nepal to fulfill her lifelong dream of visiting Mount Everest’s base camp.įast forward to February of this year, when Blake visited San Francisco to see Opera Parallèle’s “immersive” production of Everest, the 2015 opera by Joby Talbot and Gene Scheer.
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