Opera GO is an operatic scavenger hunt which sets out to take the audience on a journey through Luxembourg City to playfully discover opera through Augmented Reality (AR), with several performances throughout March and April, starting at De Gudde Wëllen in Luxembourg-Grund.
This quirky, playful walkabout experience mixing live performance and Augmented Reality starts as a celebration of creativity with live music loosely based on Ambroise Thomas’ Le songe d’une nuit d’été and Mozart’s Zauberflöte at De Gudde Wëllen.
Shakespeare’s bon-vivant Falstaff is celebrating creativity and the arts at his favourite local bar. As the party is in full swing, Mozart’s Queen of the Night appears, shocked to find that her dear operas have (literally) flown out the window. She relies on the audience’s bravery to go on a quest through the city to get her beloved operas back.
The participants are sent out to free Eurydice from the underworld and to put back into order an aria of The Barber of Seville that’s been scattered in front of the Grand Ducal Palace. Participants will have to pass through a virtual maze, and further on, a magical forest appears once they hit the right rhythm.
According to the organisers, theatre itself is a kind of virtual or extended reality where viewers go to a space to experience something that overwrites their daily experience. The use of XR in performing arts thus simply provides an extension of the kind of experience that theatre already invites its audiences to explore.
Anne Simon came up with the original idea for Opera GO in a discussion with her long-term musical collaborator, cellist, singer and performer Anthime Miller, whilst talking about ways to explore taking opera “to the streets”. This was the result of a discussion about the possibility of using the potential of new technology to democratise access to high art by creating an entry point via pop cultural forms.
Theatres were not historically the dark, hushed spaces that they are today. Ancient playwrights often wrote the audience into the architecture of their plays. In Shakespeare’s history plays, for instance, the kings often speak to their troops by turning to the audience, many of whom would have been soldiers at one point in their lives. Here, technology is used to enable audiences to reenact that older mode of spectatorship.
Turning to AR, the idea of audience participation is taken to a different level: on top of the audience being built into the architecture of the play (Papageno), the play will also be placed inside the architecture of everyday spaces. This project is about the enchantment of theatricalising non-theatrical spaces and thus discovering that theatre/opera/the arts - the imaginative - is all around, the organisers noted.
The performers are no longer on a raised stage in a dark room, far away from the quiet, orderly people in the auditorium. They can be in a living room, in a local pub or park. This can create a more intimate relationship with the story and spark curiosity. The link with games such as Pokémon Go should take the fright of the high art and stress the accessibility for everyone, Anne Simon added.
A Volleksbühn Production Concept & Direction, Musical Direction by Anne Simon, in collaboration with Lucilin, De Gudde Wëllen, CNA and Ecole de Musique Régionale Dudelange, among others.
Performances will take place on 1 March (at 15:00), 2, 23 and 24 March (15:00 and 17:00) and on 10, 11 and 12 April at 18:30. The performance takes place indoors and outdoors (about a 2k walk); the organisers stressed the need to dress accordingly.
No experience in AR is needed. Participants will need to bring their smartphone and ideally their best pair of earphones. The app is compatible with IOS and Android. Tickets cost 20€ (regular), 8€ (concessions), and Kulturpass is welcome. The shows start at De Gudde Wëllen. Bookings can be made via email at: anne@volleksbuehn.lu.
