#7: Free Your Mind! Opera & Dance Deep-Dive
This week: A look at the state of play in performance innovation. Digital Valkyries, hyperreal opera, and the hip-hop The Matrix. Plus: a guide to current funding opportunities.
This is a great moment to get excited by the Creative R&D potential of performance.
Dance, theatre, opera - they’re a scene of enormous innovation that sit at critical adjacencies with what’s happening at the sharp edges of film production, and technology development of AI the metaverse and more.
More than anything this is a great time to get excited by performance because there are some totally 🔥🔥🔥 shows and projects out there right now.
Let’s take a look at what’s happening.
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Hot project 1 // Digital Valkyries
I knew I needed to write about performance when I saw some amazing images of a new production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle currently in development in Australia.
Premiering in Brisbane this December, Director Chen Shi-Zheng’s take on Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung will bring together two parts of the Creative R&D technology ecosystem into one epic reimagining of a 15-hour long world-classic:
Large-scale, moving digital screens familiar from digital art-based immersive experiences
The use of real-time motion capture which is fundamental to the digitisation of performance
Chen Shi-Zheng’s brief for this performance from Opera Australia was “go digital!”, and to help him do that he brought in one of the most interesting digital studios, Berlin’s flora&foravisions, or FFV. FFV have form in this space, having previously created Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise for The Shed in New York which brought the same technology approach to a kung-fu musical.
What this epic approach to digitisation will allow is for characters like the Valkyries to move seamlessly between wire-based mid-air motion and digitised flight across the virtual domain present on the screens.
Back in 2016 - my god, where have the years gone! - the RSC pioneered this approach with their 400-year anniversary production of The Tempest. Working with Andy Serkis’ Imaginarium and Microsoft, they took the play’s sprite, Ariel, on a real-time journey between the real and the virtual.
I loved that production, and it felt like such a clear path forward for theatre, dance, opera and more. But the speed of technology development and relative decrease in cost in mo-cap have both been slow, and the financial horrors of Covid mean we’ve seen too little of this since.
But seeing the same core approach now rolling out for the BIGGEST of all stage-based works fills me with hope and excitement.
In the history of Western Art, maybe only Dante has ever been bigger than Wagner. Not Lord of the Rings (books or films), not Tolstoy, not Blake. He’s the epic peak. If we can get 15 hours of digital-physical brilliance out of this, EVERYTHING else is possible.
So, if you can, get over to Brisbane in December. And ENO or Royal Opera House, PURLEASE, get it to London.
Last point. From a purely aesthetic point of view, what I particularly ❤️❤️ about this digital Wagner is how it looks like 70s German kosmiche psychedelic rockers Ash Ra Tempel or Tangerine Dream. Groove on, Valkyries!
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Free Your Mind! // Enter the Hip-hop Matrix
The other reason we should celebrate the creative R&D potential of performance this week is because of “Free Your Mind ” at Manchester’s Factory International at Aviva Studios.
Wagner, however super-cool the production, will never be cool. But this production comes dripping cool out of every pore.
A re-telling of Keanu-classic The Matrix in dance (cool!), directed by Danny Boyle (cool!), designed by Es Devlin (cool!), choreographed by Kendrick ‘H20’ Sandy (cool!) and with outfits by Gareth Pugh (cool!).
But coolness in itself is hyper-transitory. “Free Your Mind” carries a deeper significance on three levels:
As another demonstration of world-class creative talent working seamlessly between digital and physical
Of the opening of a real-world cultural institution founded on the principles of Creative R&D
As a sign that tomorrow’s large scale digital innovations will be driven by commercial IP
Last week, we talked about Local Projects, Space Popular and Weta Workshop - groups working in exhibition design operating at the very top of their markets, and driving creative digital innovation top-down. To the performance sector, “Free Your Mind” is that same world-class meeting of talents, with advanced technology utterly integrated inside an interdisciplinary creative universe.
That meeting point of creative genius from across disciplines, and grounded in the experimental embrace of new technology is an utter vindication of the Factory International’s raison d’etre - and its symbolism of a new generation of cultural institutions for whom innovation is not a second thought but a driving force. Back in issue 3 I talked about London’s East Bank as part of a new wave of cultural and educational infrastructure,
forming both because of and to enable new intersections between creativity, ideas and technology.
Put Factory International straight inside that same category, a brilliant, visionary symbol of the creative potential of the 21st century.
But before we move on, let’s note one concern.
Let’s not overlook that this show is based on The Matrix.
The origins of much of today’s Creative R&D goodness are either in new approaches to out-of-copyright art (whether Van Gogh, Shakespeare or Wagner) or in original creativity from artists like Ian Cheng.
But the Lightroom’s David Hockney show made it clear to me that for this kind of work to flourish at scale it would need the accelerant of fame that only large-scale commercial IP licensing can bring.
As full of rebel, anti-establishment chic as The Matrix is (and to me it hasn’t aged at all), it’s still a $460 million box-office blockbuster, and the most significant line about this production may be the last: “Produced by special arrangement with Warner Bros Theatre Ventures.”
We will see more of this, and there will be a point where it constrains creativity rather than enables it.
$$$ // Current funding opportunities with Innovate UK
There’s a lot of people subscribed to this email who have made amazing work supported by the different funding streams for Creative R&D we’ve seen over the last decade - or who could do.
So to help you navigate what can be a complex field, here’s five of the best current Innovate UK funds you can apply to. Good luck:
ROLLING DEADLINE: UK Games Fund Larger-scale, commercial games-for-entertainment content grants (up to £150K)
NOV 8 DEADLINE: AI Solutions to Improve Productivity in the Creative Industries
NOV 22 DEADLINE: Creative Catalyst - AI in the Music Industry (up to £250K)
NOV 23 DEADLINE: MyWorld Collaborative Research and Development: Round 2 (up to £200K)
DEC 6 DEADLINE: MindsetXR - Extended Reality for mental health (up to £300K)
And finally // Hyperreality Opera
I couldn’t let this look at Creative R&D in performance end without a quick reminder of one of my favourite projects of the last few years, Current Rising at the Royal Opera House.
Supported by Storyfutures, and brilliantly produced by old friends and Creative R&D readers Annette Mees and Sam King (now brilliantly leading VR for the arts at HTC) who led the Royal Opera House’s Audience Labs programme, Current Rising was a radical re-envisioning of opera as an extended reality art-form.
It was totally, totally 🔥🔥🔥🔥.
But where is it now?
The worst side of Creative R&D is how often it disappears into invisibility. As the Audience Labs closed after Covid, it’s one of too many crucial projects which risk being lost to history. As we recognise the medium, we need to archive its outputs.
Storyfutures have done some of this with their brilliant VR R&D showcasing programme, which takes 7-10 minute VR shows out into a network of over 250 libraries. But there’s much more to do, and much that might be lost.
Enjoy your weeks.
ENDS. ❤️