VENUE 079


DEATH AND THE POWERS


THEATRE PROJECTS’ MANAGING DIRECTOR DAVID STAPLES WAS SO IMPRESSED WITH DEATH AND THE POWERS, HE FELT COMPELLED TO WRITE ABOUT IT. AS A PERFORMANCE PIECE, ITS POLARISING ATTRIBUTES WILL DRAW CRITICISM AND CELEBRATION. HERE WE HAVE THE LATTER.


monte carlo, monaco EUROPE/MIDDLE EAST/AFRICA


Imagine (if you can) an opera where the leading man hardly appears on stage but his breathing and gestures drive the scenery, the chorus is a bunch of robots, the debate about amplification of opera is ignored with the entire opera being amplified and the set is a pixel display that breathes in time to the singer. Such an opera premiered last month in Monaco. An opera like this can be put together if you have the talents of innumerable PhD’s from the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It also helps to have royal patronage - from Prince Albert II of Monaco and financial assistance from Association Futurum. The presiding genius is Tod Machover, Professor of Music and Media at the Media Lab. He is also Director of their Opera of the Future group and has been described by the Los Angeles Times as ‘America’s most wired composer’. Machover has created a number of operas incorporating new technologies, Valis premiered at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1987. The Brain Opera premiered at New York’s Lincoln Center Festival and his most recent opera Skelig is based on a very successful children’s novel and adventure story.


But Death and the Powers takes his explorations further than anything he, or probably anyone else has attempted in the world of opera. To understand the technologies and the artistic goals it is necessary to briefly explain the plot. Simon Powers is an aging billionaire from the computer industry - think Bill Gates or Steve Jobs in a few years’ time or Howard Hughes from the past. Powers wants to defy death by being subsumed into the System - a massive IT system. Powers downloads himself into everything in his environment - walls, chandelier, lighting, etc. He will live beyond his death within the System and be able to communicate and influence through the System. Powers family and colleagues have to learn how to interact with and sustain a relationship with the disembodied Powers. This leads to an erotic encounter between Evvy, his wife, and Powers as personified by the chandelier. Powers also invites them all to cheat death and join him in the System. Having established this premise, Powers enters the system and disappears from the stage. He performs the majority of the opera from an offstage location. But he is not simply singing. He is controlling many of the elements on stage. The term ‘Disembodied Performance’ has been coined to describe this system and much of it was developed by Media Lab researcher Peter Torpey. The system allows an off-stage actor or singer to give a performance on stage in a completely non-anthropomorphic form. The system uses a variety of sensors to gather data about the performer’s gestures, voice, and actions in order to infer a model of the character’s affective and cognitive state, distilling the character’s essence at any given moment. His arm and hand gestures, voice, breath, posture and stance are all combined with other inputs, processed and transmitted to a number of set elements and other components that use light, projection, movement, and sound to recreate the


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