VR Opera – Casta Diva

Just hit the play button and if you are not sure if opera is your cup of tea, check what the two druids on your left are chatting about. Their conversation is a play on intertextuality, if you want to learn more, read about it below the video.

*best performance on Chrome browser. Firefox and Safari may not support the 360 view.

MIXED REALITY experience marks a new chapter across industries but for us it is something we started a while ago. For years we have been working with artists on stage. For years we have been creating visual effects. Then, in 2012 we mixed the two and brought real people into our 3D projection mapping shows, which was pretty cool but at that time it was not a buzz concept yet. It all came with VR (virtual reality) culture that MR (mixed reality) has become a new trend. Casta Diva by Bellini is one of the most famous arias performed by top opera stars including Maria Callas. With our postmodern passion to mix the classical and the pop culture we created this 360 immersive experience to showcase how the highbrow and lowbrow cultures can work in perfect harmony and open themselves cross-culturally.

But our show is not only limited to Virtual Reality and VR headsets. It can be staged live at any occasion. With our extensive experience in show production and entertainment technology, we are ready to put this performance on the real stage with the real singer, hologram technology or 3D mapping effects.

INTERTEXTUALITY is a device that creates ‘interrelationship’ between works of art by use of allusion, quotation, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche and parody and it is often mistaken for plagiarism. One of the epitomes of intertextuality in the cinema is Matrix, the movie by Wachowskis. Intertextuality was originally associated with literary texts but soon became identified in other areas of art and popular culture. When watching the first version of our opera, some of the audience got quickly bored as they were not really into the genre. We then came up with an idea to enhance it. The inspiration came from classics, i.e. Muppet Show (Statler and Waldorf) and Beavis and Buthead. To keep the spirit of Norma (the opera where this aria comes from) we introduced druid characters and let them chat in the scene. It adds a spice in the 360 video as the audience may choose how to interact with the scene and what to look at or what to focus on – the music, the dialogue, the graphics. We did not want the audience to be limited to one experience (opera) only.

Here is how we played with referencing some classical and popular culture artworks in the druids dialogue:
Teleport – it mostly reminds the Stargate from Stargate movie.
Vincenzo Bellini – author of the Norma opera (with Casta Diva as the opening aria)
Great Cornholio – a character from the Beavis and Buthead show
Samuel – Samuel Becket, the dialogue exchange comes from Waiting for Godot.
Brute – Brutus – the guy who stabbed Julius Casesar, (if you believe Shakespeare)
Mary Poppins – Mary Poppins
Hanaka-san – a Japanese character often compared to Bloody Mary
Simon Cowell – all times best reality show judge including Britain’s Got Talent, The X Factor, America’s Got Talent, American Idol, and more
O tempora o mores! – Oh the times! Oh the customs! words by Cicero who lived and wrote at the time of the Norma settings.