3-D Opera

As an innovative work with moments of real poignancy, Blank Out incorporated an avant-garde lineage of techniques into a visual and narrative twenty-first century dialectic in step with a wave of experimental operas popping up across the globe. A seventy-minute story that originally premiered in Amsterdam, its theme is loss and its tangled retrieval through the lens of traumatic memory. The performance relied on the non-linear interweaving of narrative that its director and composer, Michel van der Aa, has been formulating into his vision of an experimental language for the operatic stage. He also incorporated parts of poems from the South African poet, Ingrid Jonker (1933–1965), on whose life the opera is based. Jonker drowned herself when she was just thirty-one.

Staged in the 55,000-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, replete with an eighty-foot ceiling, the site was either a set designer’s dream or a nightmare. The creators were tasked with challenges like pinpointing the exact viewing angle of the 3-D screen in terms of the audience’s perception. This was critical because both eyes must perceive the focal plane simultaneously and accurately, as a 3-D image is shaped, not only in the retina, but also deep within the folds of the brain.

The opera begins with the sultry and pitch-perfect Swedish soprano, Miah Persson, as a “Woman” agonizing over the previous death of her seven-year-old son who accidentally drowned in the Dutch countryside. Persson appears simultaneously on stage and in a 3-D prerecorded projected image. Three representations appear, one real and two virtual, but the 3-D projections at this time seem flat. The flesh and blood Woman, who is now moving stones strew about on stage, strolls over to a maquette of the house where she and her deceased son used to live together. Persson is tasked with becoming a de facto stagehand, moving an HD camera while creating a mise-en-scène that projects the interior and exterior of the miniature house up onto the big 3-D screen. This technique helps straddle the line between mimetic visual cue and entrée to another level of reality.

Halfway through the story the point of view joltingly changes. It turns out the seven-year-old child did not die at all; it was actually his mother who perished while saving him. This non-linear retelling of trauma slices and dices through the standard Verdian dramatic arc, borrowing disjointed narrative techniques from contemporary literature and cinema. Though there is a pre-recorded chorus from the Netherlands Chamber Choir and an electronic soundtrack composed on a modular synthesizer dating from 1976, the visuals and clear vocals from the performers are what carry the gravitas of the story. The boy child, who appears almost anonymously and briefly on screen as a child, is for the most part portrayed cinematically as an adult “Man,” depicted by the vocally supple British baritone Roderick Williams. He returns to the actual house in the countryside to pack away the detritus of his memories of his mother’s life and tragic death. At this point, the 3-D aspects of the opera kick into high gear, making use of the focal plane of depth the technology was developed for, including elongated shots of hallways, outdoor brambles, and even drone footage of the countryside.

A very plain technique is then incorporated that ties this mixed reality piece to its 3-D superimposition. A supposed spool of old style 35 mm film was unwound, but the film was replaced by a long piece of cloth that the Woman placed in front of the 3-D screen. Within the pre-recorded 3-D world, the cloth was picked up by the Man and wound around pedestrian household furnishings. It then passed from the 3-D picture frame on screen back again into the real world where it was retrieved by the...