Producing "We All Know Too Much"
“We All Know Too Much” is a Music Theatre / Musical / Opera based on a story of the same name by Chris Eales, Music by Rupert Cheek. We invite you on an unforgettable journey through time and space, to places where hope and fear mingle with the highest aspirations of Human Consciousness, where Adventure and Philosophy collide on the interplanetary highway. Along the way, we risk the perils of Fanaticism and Fundamentalism, the sorrows of Illusion and Delusion and perhaps, ultimately, redemption through Literature, Art, Education, Theology. “We All Know Too Much” suggests that Mankind’s striving to know everything leads to an undesirable future. After humans destroy planet Earth, their only option is to colonize the moon….That is until The Trinity, researchers in Evolutionary Metaphysics, develop(s) a virtual world.
How have computers, the internet and accessibility to knowledge shaped our world and our consciousness? With a story that’s so centred around technology, it might be easy to let the technology used to produce the show become the end to the means rather than the means to the end. It’s important to me to use the technology to tell the story, not just for the sake of it. One of the most recent and relevant operas which has been / is a model for WAKTM is?Death And The Powers?by Tod Machover. He explains the concept & philosophy behind the opera.
Michael Van Der Aa's 2021 opera Upload appears to be a re-imagining or different approach to the same concept.
" '"I’m here, that’s for sure!” the digital facsimile of a father tells his daughter early in Michel van der Aa’s new opera, Upload. What exactly it means to be “here” — particularly when someone exists only as consciousness stored on blockchain data spread across thousands of servers — is up for debate, and guides the drama in “Upload,” a masterly weaving of music, film and motion-capture technology?... ".
Review: In ‘Upload,’ Do Blockchains Dream of Electric Lizards, Joshua Barone (ass. perf. arts ed. on the Culture?Desk, classical music critic.?@joshbarone?&?Facebook) www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/arts/music/dutch-national-opera-upload-review.html
TV and Film and provide much inspiration for various aspects of WAKTM, such as the computer characters in?2001; A Space Odyssey?(WarnerBros) and?Red Dwarf, the designs of?Star Trek? and?Star Wars?. The 2009 Duncan Jones film?Moon?starring Sam Rockwell re-ignited my excitement for the project. Jones was himself inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece?2001.
The Philip Glass / Godfrey Regio?Qatsi?collaborations are audio visual tone poems without spoken dialogue;?Koyaanisqatsi?is ‘about’ the present, the impact of humans on the planet, the dependence on technology. It “contrasts the tranquil beauty of nature with the frenzied hum of contemporary society”. Naqoyqatsi?essays the “shift from a world organised by principles of nature to one dominated by technology, synthetic & virtual”.
James Cameron’s?Avatar?(2009) differs from WAKTM in that in WAKTM the ‘others bodies’ of the characters are Virtual whereas in?Avatar, they are a physical biological body. Cameron wanted his audience to imagine that
“…human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human’s intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body. It’s not an avatar in the sense of just existing as ones and zeroes in cyberspace. It’s actually a physical body. The lead character, Jake,?…, has his human existence and his avatar existence. He’ll be shown using live-action photography in 3-D and computer-generated imagery.”?(R. W. Keegan, 11 Jan, 2007, Q & A with James Cameron, Time Magazine)
The Matrix?“depicts a future in which reality as perceived by most humans is actually a?simulated reality?created by?sentient machines?to pacify and subdue the human population, while their bodies’ heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source”?Wikipedia
“Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in what form? He perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, these have previously been unreliable. So Descartes determines that the only indubitable knowledge is that he is a?thinking thing.” (Decartes @ wikipedia, Consciousness Explained,?Daniel C. Dennett pub Penguin, 1993). Total Recall?similarly deals with the “question of reality versus delusion” and asks “whether the character’s experience is real or being fed directly to his mind” (wikipedia).
Browsing indiegogo (a film crowdfunding website) some years ago, I chanced upon “Meaning of Life” (no longer on IndieGogo). Reading about the project resonated with me and the WAKTM project; “…we are today in the midst of a technological revolution that overturns everything and provides unprecedented opportunity for global collaboration and communication. The sharing of ideas and melding of imaginations will enable us to solve global problems and answer universal questions that have eluded us from the beginning of time.”
Real v Virtual: People & Places
My initial thought was to present the Real life scenes through Real / Live performers/performances on stage, and the Virtual world scenes through virtual sets (perhaps projecting a real time Virtual world scene on a large screen) or film. I see 4 possibilities:
Real characters in Real places / Real characters in Virtual places
Virtual characters in Virtual places / Virtual characters in Real places.
I then started to research the History of Theatre to look for ideas; my first port of call was?Wikipedia
"BURSTvisual?is a collective of multimedia artists [...who...] specialise in the production and direction of original video and photography, in particular for use in live settings such as theatre and opera. Our content is a lively mixture of original 3d and 2d animation, filmed material, video archive and live mixed sources."
Burst also work with/as?New Opera Hero, "a live act who compose music, story, visuals and technology simultaneously within the structure of a band." and are interested in creating "an on stage multimedia collage in which every element influences and changes the overall performance. The production process is not built around a finished script or score; instead it is the combination of various building blocks. Musical themes, story characters, images, technology, and acrobatics are shuffled around like a painter moving parts of a collage around a canvas until they fall into place and reveal the final picture."
Derek Gifford wondered if we might base the production/appearance of the opening scene on a scene from the movie?CONTACT?where John Hurt invited Jodie Foster to take a ride as that is the basic visual from the audience perspective. One person is in a space station and another is elsewhere looking into a monitor.
1) a stage, 2) scenery on the stage, 3) a projected video backdrop
Elizabeth Stenger (RIP) agreed “I do like this idea for The Highway, I still think The Garden would best be represented in Second Life or another Virtual World.”
“As far as the virtual scenes in WAKTM would require land to provide that as well as I’m looking for a team of Machinaphotograpgers as the way we shoot scenes in Virtual Worlds required more than 1 camera.” The Virtual Reality world from a Second Life point is the space station. The backdrop is there and the actor is green screened over it then it is filmed the resulting film is run and shown on a screen to simulate a large monitor so the onstage actor can interact with it.”
“As far as The Garden Scene, I think that can be filmed entirely in Second Life. As far as The Highway Scene based on our chats we’ve had I really like the idea of using the Microcosm and Macrocosm as energy from the way the brain works, or the universe for that matter might be better done with avatars filmed on a green screen.”
“To maintain continuity between the people cast in the physical roles and we can make avatars to emulate their physical appearance. When you ask me why I haven’t moved forward, part of the reason is I haven’t seen the cast. Without knowing what the physical cast will look like it is difficult to create avatars so the audience will know which avatar is Matt, Trinity or other characters in these scenes.”
“Two Boys, set in an English industrial city in 2001, combines two story elements rarely seen on the operatic stage: a police procedural and a dramatization of the mysterious and lonely lives of those who inhabit the dark corners of the Internet. “What was so exciting for me about this story, and what was so poignant is that we don’t live in a place where there are masked balls, really, anymore,” Muhly says of his inspiration for the opera. “So I thought the Internet — where you can really pretend to be another person — would actually be quite a traditional frame for an opera. I’d like to think Two Boys is both new and also very, very old.”?”?theguardian.com — 30 Oct ‘14 — Muhly-two-boys-Met Opera-cd-review
For John Adams’/Peter Sellars’ opera?Dr Atomic, the set(s) ‘intentional sparseness is beautiful unto itself’ and “funnels the viewer’s attention to the compelling content of the opera — the powerful words and music….”.
I met Anthony Doherty on LinkedIn when he commented on a post about WAKTM. He shared some insight he’d gained into opera and music in general with me via email; I thank him for giving me permission to publish what he shared. He is a composer, arranger, voice teacher, tutor and editor as well and sometimes dusts off his stage manager clothes.
“The director David Belasco was famous for reproducing exactly any actual setting, such as a real restaurant, down to the smallest detail. Another writer pointed out the effect this has: the curtain goes up, and the audience recognizes the interior of the restaurant and starts checking out the all the details. Meanwhile the play is going on. Better to have just a few tables or whatever without more details than necessary for the action. The audience accepts what it represents and pays attention to the play itself. Good designers know how to deal with that.
I was musical director/conductor for a production of [Puccini’s] La Boheme, in which the designer, working with the director, came up with a basic structure that worked for all three different scenes, just by moving some things around. Doing things like that can also have a unifying effect. Opera is symbolic. After all, people don’t go around singing at each other in real life, and especially suddenly all singing the same thing as a chorus.”
“In our opera the action takes place either on a dock by the sea or on the patio deck of a house. That’s from my librettist’s original short story, and it’s brilliant. A deck and a dock are similar structures. It’s almost the same word. but in this story they represent two opposites. The sea is lonely. From the dock you can’t look out and see where you came from or where you’re going.”
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“For the main character the dock is the gateway to nowhere. The deck, on the other hand, is attached to a home (not just a house). It’s a warm, safe place. It can have a railing to keep you from falling off, which the dock doesn’t. So we realized that for the set the same structure had to be used for both deck and dock, because it’s a powerful symbol of the two paths in the main character’s life. (It also lowers costs, since only one structure needs to be built instead of two. Producers like that). I sketched a possible way that could be done. That helps us picture the action as we write & compose. But it will be up to the designer to make it work.” (Anthony Doherty)
alKamie’s Virtual Reality Theatre “coalesces the alive tangibility of real performers with 3D animation technology to create a hallucinogenic theatre through which onstage characters and audiences tumble alike…uses front projection over an entire white stage space to immerse live performers in the virtual space of computer models. Imagine performers onstage inhabiting the world of a computer game. They appear to move within the world and you can follow their actions in the same way a viewer of a film follows the actions of the character.”?
I found something along similar lines in the work of Joachim Sauter via The Creators Project. “For a performance of “The Jew of Malta”, Joachim Sauter did elaborate projection mapping. He projected virtual architecture onto the stage?[as al’kamie does], and the actors costumes were camera tracked so when they moved, the image being projected would move as well.” Sauter explained that “The goal of the project was the enhancement of the traditional static stage setting into a reactive and dynamic stage design that plays its own vital role in the narration.” Exploring Sauter’s site, I found what might perhaps be a more relevant application of the technology “grammar” he is helping to develop; a virtual garden of sorts. Medial Stage & Costume from ART+COM - https://vimeo.com/39257590
The Creators Project (a partnership between Intel & Vice) also introduced me to Amon Tobin’s ISAM. Using a 3D set is another way of creating or enhancing a 3D effect.?
Version 2.0 of ISAM is a ‘mixture of a movie, theatrical thing and a live show’.
I also found a “Futuristic Animated Opera” in progress called Liberteria by composer Sabrina Pena Young (facebook,?blogspot). Although more of a film than a live performance, it does share a few concepts with WAKTM; post-apocalypse and death.
A video I chanced upon of an advert for the LG Optimus mobile phone showed me further possibilities of 3D projection.?
“NuFormer is an innovative multimedia agency specialized in 3D video mapping on buildings and objects… branching film and video productions, combined with 3D and 2D motion graphic design.”?https://www.facebook.com/NuFormer
iClone4 is a film and video production engine which allows user to animate 3D video in real time.?https://www.reallusion.com/iclone
iClone 6 Intro — How to create fast 3D animation?
Another possible way of realising the virtual world section(s) of the production would be to create machinima, which ‘uses real time interactive online 3D engines’, often Second Life (PookyMedia — YouTube).
Perhaps Reaction Grid, who have offered their support for the opera by building a 3D space, could assist in this department.
‘Machinima (muh-sheen-eh-mah) is filmmaking within a real-time, interactive, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies, the convergence of filmmaking, animation & game development.’ (www.machinima.org)
In August of 2012 I discovered this 360 degree immersive project. I think it looks amazing!?The 360 degree element makes me think of the Roundhouse in London.
Would it be possible to have just 1 set in WAKTM? What about a revolving stage like there is at the National Theatre in London?
Audience Participation aka ‘User Generated Content’
Nico Mulhy’s opera Two Boys contains ‘chorus passages delivering multitudinous internet voices lit by the glow of hundreds of laptops, with the entire stage flooded with video imagery’. (D. Benedict, Pub Wed., 29 June 2011,?variety.com). Mulhy argues that projections should be “integrated into the environment as elements of plot, not just decoration” and suggests that “projections are essentially stylized versions of lighting”
The?Blue Man Group?show in London raised the question of the possibility of audience participation, to support the internets User Created Content. "Please yell if you're paying attention" / “Stomp your feet / clap your hands”
Mulhy?argues?that projections should be “integrated into the environment as elements of plot, not just decoration” and suggests that “projections are essentially stylized versions of lighting”.
For WAKTM, this might involve audience members sending in media (text, images, audio, video) — perhaps using their mobile phones, but this would necessitate making sure that WAKTM had permission to use such submitted media which may cause a problem. It may involve audience ‘performance’ e.g. clapping, singing …
“I love the idea of the audience being able to “text” or “email” things during the play, which would appear on screens and images as part of the set… But, this would need to be monitored/screened to prevent profanity?… Perhaps someone backstage could receive & check the messages, and include the better ones within the screens. It does leave open the danger that everyone will be on their phones rather than watching the play, so perhaps this “interactive” function should only be made available to the audience at certain (appropriate) times….?” (Chris Eales @ Facebook Group)
Partly inspired by a comment Elizabeth Stenger made (“Check Livestream, I believe it can be done this way there.”), I wondered if it would be possible to have some kind of live stream of blogs somewhere within the staging/set of WAKTM. I wondered how fast the stream could/should be — i.e. how fast could the audience read? Would they need to be able to read the actual words or would it be sufficient for them simply to be able to recognise that it was a blog-stream? If we used actual blogs, we would need permission from authors/publishers to use their content.
‘The recent developments in mobile Augmented Reality (the addition of a virtual layer to reality) allows Sander Veenhof [?www.sndrv.nl/index.php?index=contact?] to explore ways to open up the virtual public space for anyone to contribute to.’ (YouTube — www.youtube.com/user/sndrv?)
All our senses are linked to our memory pathways. Smell is supposed to be the strongest, but colour plays a part too. The colours in Virtual Reality could/should be different, hyper-real, oversaturated. Certain colours can soothe or stimulate, trigger a memory, help you feel stronger when you need a boost. Bleak & monochrome schemes for scenes that are meant to make us sad Brighter & warmer colours to suggest happiness. Music (a song, lyric, even a few bars) can also trigger memories, especially if it was playing at significant moments.
What does The Highway look like?
How can we create (the illusion of) a space shuttle?
How might film/video, lighting & sound combine to create a storm?
How might we suggest that a scene was a flashback?