Tag Archives: opera

Opera Moments

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The other day, I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new exhibition “Opera: Passion, Power and Politics”. This latest extravaganza explores the context, history and origins of seven great operas in seven magnificent cities, from Venice to Leningrad, where they were originally performed and for which they are now renowned for their operatic heritage. It has been curated as a journey through opera, full of suspense, the visitor never quite knowing what to expect next.

Quality headphones on, my friend and I were initially led into a passage where a beautiful aria burst forth into our ears. My friend started grinning from ear-to-ear and went straight into ‘the zone’. After our visit, she told me how the first few lines of the aria had triggered a Proustian moment, taking her right back to a poignant time in her life when she had first heard it. I looked on enviously while being distracted by trying to get my headphones to sit more comfortably on my head. It proved more difficult, however, for me to be transported. So I left my friend in her element and wandered into the next darkened room, where I was taken back to 17th Century Venice, which is where it all began. There were various exhibits in the room intended to give you a taster of the passion, the politics and the power – that had been crafted and selected to convey iconic aspects, including original music scores, costumes, and old instruments.

For me, the multimedia experience was largely about the music playing in my ears rather than the visuals confronting my eyes. I tried to focus on the artefacts in front of me and read accompanying materials but it proved quite difficult. The sounds in my ears had my undivided attention for most of the time. Sometimes, I managed to synch what I was looking at with what I was hearing.  Other times, I simply closed my eyes, wandered around and listened. I barely noticed the other people milling around the space or how crowded it was. They appeared almost like solo ghosts coming in and out of focus. No-one spoke, just the occasional smile of recognition or a whisper, with a partner/companion. The one time I did hear an old couple talking to each other rather loudly, it appeared very discordant and, immediately, another woman walked over to them and shushed them.

The exhibition set-up uses wireless location-based tech to track where you are so that the head-hand set can play the relevant operas and sounds that go with the rooms as you enter and walk around them. No need to ever tap a number into the handheld device to match up with the exhibit in front of you. The effect is to place you in your own digital musical bubble – quite a contrast to how multimedia guides are used in art galleries and other museums. The transitions from one opera to another are abrupt but the moving is fluid. You don’t have to suspend your disbelief of going back in time to work out what buttons to press.

In the middle of the series of themed rooms and joining passages is a large cavernous space where short clips from films of more recent operas  were projected onto multiple sets as if appearing on the backstage of an opera house.  Very cleverly done. It was mesmerizing to watch and listen to one after the other – enjoying the climax moments as they multiplied across them. This was where the combination of sound and sights really worked for me in unison.

The whole experience was one of sheer delight. I could not agree more with an excerpt from last week’s Evening Standard’s review:

“Throughout, you’re hearing sounds so beautiful that it’s a wrench to leave one historic moment and enter another. You want to stick with what you’re hearing. What drives you on is curiosity to see what the clever organizers have come up with next.”

However, you are always very much an onlooker – in reverence and in awe. Opera does not have to always be so. Last year, one of my students and I worked on a collaborative project with the English National Opera and a tech company, called Holition, where we developed and evaluated an app that was intended to enable the general public to literally ‘step into character’ and in doing so, imagine what it was like to be an opera singer. It was called the MagicMirror and we dressed it up to appear as a make-up mirror in a real dressing room at the London Coliseum Opera House. It was incredibly effective. Pity, there was not some more of this kind of interactivity at the V&A. But then again it is a museum and not an opera house.

 

Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Still 3D

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I remember buying my first 3D disposable camera in the mid 90s from a family-run store in Palo Alto and being wowed back then. Opening the wallet of my first 12 glistening prints, I was tickled by each one’s illusion of a 3D world, re-created on thick ribby paper. My snaps were of friends in tourist poses; standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge, leaning on a big Cadillac, steaming in an outdoor hot tub, being dwarfed by giant cacti and being flashed by neon signs. The iconic images stood out boldly against the Californian-coloured backgrounds, like 3D models offering an imaginary, childlike depth of view. The hues were so vivid that the foreground objects seemed to pop up and out; nothing like the world we see through our own stereo eyes or when we interpret 3D from conventional 2D images. All very Wizard-of-Oz and dream-like.

In one of my earlier entries, Hyper 3D, I talked about how 3D technology capitalizes on hyper-reality. Balls, cars, arrows, and schools of fish come racing towards us and over our shoulders – making us feel the action as we slouch and flinch on our sofas. But as David Hockney wryly observes – in Gayford’s new book on conversations about his works – it’s just, too, toy-like: we don’t actually see or experience the world like that, ‘it is like someone is making a life-size replica of the world’.

So why not use the evocative power of 3D technology to do something different other than ‘out-real’ reality – depicting something that normally can’t be seen but only imagined? A mirror of the mind, perhaps, projecting hidden repressed emotions, memories and images? Last Friday, I saw an ingenious use of still 3D at Sadler’s Wells that tried to do just that – and it worked brilliantly. Wayne McGregor in collaboration with OpenEndedGroup (New York based, digital art collective) and composer Mark-Anthony Turnage put on the latter’s chamber opera “Twice Through the Heart” and added elements of still 3D, by projecting a tormented woman’s past, using two mega-screens that covered the front of the stage, out into the stalls and circle. The audience were given bright yellow plastic glasses to experience the effect. White membraned, 3D still images emerge like frost does when shown appearing on a glass window in slow motion. Behind the organic filaments sat a single mezzo-soprano – Sarah Connolly – alone at a bare kitchen-like table.

The story behind the opera is of a woman who has killed her husband, with a  knife, driven to such depths because of his constant abuse. Now, she finds herself doubly imprisoned; the memories of her nightmarish former domestic life, where her husband kept her captive, unleash and unwind within the solitary confines of her prison cell. She cannot escape – 3D images surround her and we the audience; a kitchen sink with grey blood-stained taps loom above both her and us, coated in milky, tissue-like film. Against this otherworldly digital backdrop, we see her physical body writhe and contort; her pained voice etching further the pathos. The illusion is of a tortured mind oozing out of human skin, creeping towards each audience member, almost within reaching touch – such is the clever use of still 3D digital technology.

Then suddenly, to coincide with a dramatic moment in the opera, the digital imagery vanishes. In an instant, we see only a stark image of Sarah Connolly, singing, standing and staring into an abyss.

The beauty of 3D digital photography is in its stillness rather than its motion; enveloping rather than engulfing our senses. And OpenEndedGroup has gone one step further; combining it with the physical world to unsettle and suggest. This creative use is leaps and bounds beyond the toy-like, fast moving (main)stream of objects that propel towards us on commercial 3D TV.

Image from OpenEndedGroup – music.columbia.edu