NYTimes.com: On a recent Friday afternoon, Yuval Sharon gestured enthusiastically at one of many television screens mounted inside a circular wooden structure under construction in a large parking lot in this city’s Arts District. “It won’t ever be the same thing twice,” he said.
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What a cool idea! This reminds me a lot of a production of “Fefu and Her Friends” I saw a while ago at Emerson. The audience was first gathered in a large black-box theater space, which started at the house where the majority of the action took place. Then, the action was halted, and the audience was divided into three groups (by actresses) which were then brought into three separate “rooms” of the house, then led to the next, then led to the next, before being led back to the main room altogether for the final scene. It was a really interesting theatrical format which I had never experienced before, and it really did help to emphasize the idea of all of these things happening in different rooms at the same time. My friend, who was one of the stage managers on the production, talked to us after about how much work it was to orchestrate the show, as each scene would, inevitably, not take the exact same amount of time each time. I noticed that each scene had some kind of “filler” activity at the end which would give the other scenes a chance to finish before the actresses were told to enter the room and lead the audience to the next scene. For one it was the characters solving a puzzle together, for another it was the woman eating soup, etc. This article describes a similar method of having extra measures planned in case musicians need to stall for time. I’m sure this production has even more technical complexities, as the team also has to deal with potential traffic, and has to account for so many more scene transitions. The idea of literally bringing opera into city streets is so delightful, and I’m so glad that more and more companies are taking on the challenge of redefining what “immersive” means. I think it is so brave, especially in a theater world where most people are so set on trying to make a performance as close as possible to the previous, to make a show that practically thrives off of every performance being unique.
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