Some uses of new technology in lyric theatre, in relation to intermedial mise en scene in theatrical staging, and the remediation of operatic media.

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The project explores the challenges for lyric theatre that are presented by technological change. Communucations technologies are effecting a fundamental alteration in how human experience is mediated, and devices based on the principle of Digital Signal Processing permit new forms of convergence and exchange between different expressive means, such as sound and image. My interest lies in exploring how technology can extend the possibilities of opera, stimulating its historic ambition to create lyric relationships between the different expressive media of space and time, sound, image, singing and performance. This raises a number of issues for my practice area as an opera director, scenic designer and author of multimedia works. Devices which translate sound into projected imagery in real-time, whereby a musician can direct visual outcome, or a visual artist shape music, have a clear potential for extending the intermedial relations of opera. New relationships between impulse and expression challenge hierarchical models of authority at work in traditional opera performance, since, in theory, the roles of conductor, singers, orchestra, scenic context etc can be reassigned across all participants. Other new media, eg the web, extend this challenge by allowing expressive exchange between different sites, performers or audiences, in contrast to opera's conventional time-space constituents eg proscenium arch, orchestra pit, a single audience point of view.This tension between new technologies and the paradigms of traditional opera is my central concern.Research will address 3 questions.1. How can new technologies allow the hierarchical media-relations of conventional opera to be re-configured to new expressive and communicative ends? 2. How do new technologies allow the expressive and communicative energies of lyric theatre to be translated into new environments such as the web?3. How do new technologies allow new relations to be made between the conventional time-space constituents of lyric theatre?These will be investigated, 1. through studio investigation using translation softwares such as MaxMsp/Jitter and Isadora, making audiovisual studies around material by three composers, chosen for their different historic relation to the media of opera; 2. through workshop development to public performance of three new lyric theatre works, testing potentials for new intermedial relations and remediation:1 Les Noces: a theatre-based work, taking Stravinsky's piece - an historic deconstruction of hierarchical relations - as a starting point for a series of 10 minute performed 'chapters', reconfiguring core lyric theatre elements: dancer, singer, pianist, conductor, scenic artist (eg a dancer conducting from the pit, a pianist enacting ritual movement) and technological interventions (eg digital translation devices producing sound from movement, intermedial combinations of new and old technologies,) and the merging of proscenium and preparation contexts.2 Opera for the small screen: explores how qualities of operatic singing and performance physicality can translate into a non-theatrical outcome, such as a gallery piece, web-site object, or broadcast TV, using Contact Improvisation dance, singers and familiar camcorder technology to generate performance readings of a Mozart opera quartet, depicting quarrelling emotional perspectives.3 The Lost Chord: aims to disrupt conventional time-space constituents of lyric theatre, opening them to relationships configured through new technology, decontextualising proscenium operatic elements and immersing them in other spatial contexts, with web-based remote communication and physical computing, built around a remediation of Sullivan's song The Lost Chord, a historic image of trancendental intermedial connection.Research will be disseminated through academic contexts and public performance.