Caged Birds is a production combining AR, cutting-edge contemporary music, dance and a live audience vote.
The opera industry is currently evolving at an unprecedented velocity. In the three years that I have been at Shenandoah, we have seen a shift in focus within North America from programming canonic works to ever more frequently profiling new compositions that tell stories of now, and of real historical people.
Our greatest challenge as educators is to equip our student body with the best tools to make a smooth transition from the educational to professional environment. The fall opera is therefore instrumental to fulfilling this objective and embracing the industry of now.
In each of the fall productions we aim to push the bounds of what opera can be. Without being fixed to a specific performance venue or style of piece, this is our slot in which experimental theatre and opera can intersect, allowing voice students to collaborate with students from across the conservatory and wider university itself.
I had been speaking to the team at the SCIL Center for several months about the possibility of involving AR/VR within opera as this has become a talking point at several of the most recent Opera America and Opera Europa conferences. Having worked in video extensively myself I was also itching to excite our students about the possibilities that pre-existing and live recording can hold, and the ability for it to intersect in live performance practice itself.
After last year's Philip Glass performance and trip to the Venice Biennale (featuring a new commission by Brent Michael-Davies), I understood that not only do our students have an appetite for challenging themselves musically, but also that there is a brilliant contemporary music ensemble that exists on campus called the EDGE Ensemble who were keen to collaborate (led by professors Jonathan Newman and Tim Robblee). It seemed like this was too great an opportunity to miss and we decided that we would use this performance slot to combine forces.
Additionally, after last years dance/voice collaboration, we decided that we wanted to keep on developing this relationship too. You will find that dance in this work is integrated in a deeper and even more meaningful way than the last a the dancers take on a role that helps facilitate our singers on their journey through the piece.
Caged Birds is a devised music theatre piece (in the European chamber opera sense, not musical theatre), in which I have worked with our students from a skeleton script that I wrote over the summer to build into an exploration of a specific event: several famous (and many notorious) figures from across history meet in a fictional courtroom that broaches the void between life and death. The audience watches them come to terms with some of the baggage and regrets that each individual has accumulated over life, and concludes with a live vote. The ending of our opera each evening, you decide.
The music that we have selected is incredibly abstract — most of it does not contain words that we would conventionally recognize as language, but consists mostly of vocables and sounds. To an extent this was a gift to us because we could lean on physical expression to tell the story that we wanted to across the evening. In our piece our characters start physically bound to those with whom they held a strong (and possibly damaging) bond with during their lives, and across the evening our characters start to understand that if they want to escape from the courtroom setting they must learn how to let go of the pain they are carrying with them. When they finally start to accept change into their life a group of dancers appears who unshackle the singers from each other. In the remainder of the evening our characters are free to walk their own path by apologizing or reckoning with those who tormented or tainted their lives, and to form new connections in the after life.
When you enter you will be shown how to use an iPad that introduces the AR element of the show and also the dance aspect. In this AR element you will see the dancers as ghost like figures — invisible to the human eye, but visibly perceptible in the space when you hold up your iPad.
The dance-like figures will reappear during the evening, but only when our characters are fully prepared to accept emotional growth and change.
Just before we are ready to go with the show itself these iPads will be collected in and court assembled. Your role as audience is to be our jury. You are free to form your own independent judgments as to where the characters on stage will go after court concludes, and will be encouraged to participate in a swift (two minute) vote via QR code or paper form at the end of the evening.
The characters that you will see on stage in this opera include:
King George III
Queen Charlotte
King Charles III
Princess Diana
Marilyn Monroe
Jackie Kennedy
President John F. Kennedy
Jade Goody
Max Clifford
Monika Lewinsky
Hillary Clinton
President Bill Clinton
Thurgood Marshall
Amy Winehouse
Blake Fielder-Civil
Lord Charles Somerset
James Barry
James Hewitt
Sylvia Plath
Ted Hughes
Ann Sexton
Bobby Brown
Whitney Houston
The purpose of creating a devised work where students are on stage all evening is multi-faceted. It builds on their acting skills of knowing how to still embody a role physically even when they are not necessarily at the forefront of dramatic action. It also creates a sense of ensemble, and community within our group. Furthermore, each and every singer in this piece has authorship to this work as they have all contributed lines for their characters via improvisation during the earliest parts of rehearsals.
You should not come away feeling like you have understood everything on stage, but you should come away feeling like you have shared in the performance event itself and contributed to it in the same way that we all have. There are many firsts in this style of performance for Shenandoah Conservatory and I hope that you enjoy the adventure as much as we have in creating it. It’s been an incredible challenge, but also a fascinating one too.
I’d like to take a moment to thank all the collaborators – from theatre design and production and Dave for helping to reassemble Glaize Studio Theatre and fielding endless emails about conductor cameras, for Matt for scrambling around with me in the workshop pulling out chairs, to Cheryl Yancey and the costume department for lending us costumes, to Karsen Green for teaching Cassidy Holmes how to surge all the pieces of material that you will see in the first part of the evening.
But most of all to the key players in this: Kit Wilder (who has created some beautiful lighting for this show), to Lindsay Browning who is always a dream collaborator, to Jonathan for painstakingly arranging the Eastman for us and orchestrating it (and also for typesetting the Ratniece and spending months hunting for the score via Austria and Latvia), to Maggie Waite for jumping in to work sound just a week ago, and to Kevin and Dasia who stepped up to associate directors in this role and have risen to this challenge (Dasia is also operating the board during the show, and you will see Kevin helping facilitate the live element), and finally to the students. This has been a totally new experience for them and one that has pushed them miles beyond their musical comfort zones, but they have been 110% committed from the moment go. This is a performance made with true teamwork and I hope that you enjoy this abstract occurrence.
– Ella Marchment, director