New opera arrives via wireless headphones

Usually when you’re going to see a show, you buy a ticket, find your seat, sit down and wait for the performance to begin. However, this isn’t the case with the opera “Invisible Cities,” which is directed by Yuval Sharon and is being performed by his production company, The Industry.The opera is staged at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, and is performed while bystanders meet at restaurants and catch trains. The singers and dancers coexist with the commuters and act as an invisible layer of reality.“Basically you’re given a headset — a really nice headset,” KCRW host Lisa Napoli said. “And, instead of going to sit down, you roam around as you hear live music performed in your headset and you hear the operatic voices as they emerge. You’re never really quite sure where they’re going to come from next.”The Invisible Cities Opera is based off of the 1972 novel of the same name by Italo Calvino.“[The novel] tells the story of Kublai Kahn and Marco Polo and the discussions between them when they meet,” Sharon said. “Marco Polo narrates the cities that Kublai Khan commands, Kublai Khan having an enormous reach in his empire, but not actually having seen the cities in it. So, Marco Polo comes up to him and tells him about all of these imaginary cities, like cities that are built on spiraled seashells, cities where everyone you’ve loved and lost are reborn as fishmongers and grocers, or cities in which the only things left are water pipes.”Invisible Cities relies on Sennheiser wireless headphones to let the audience hear the live singers and dancers as they move throughout the space.“I think about it a little like a ‘choose your own adventure’ kind of thing, in which the [audience] will be moving throughout the historic parts of union station, and will be looking for the singers and dancers,” Sharon said. “It will be up to [the audience] to find the singers and dancers, or potentially not find them and enjoy the space around them by just listening. It’s giving the audience a very private experience in such a public place.”According to Sharon, the performers are professionally and traditionally trained, but how the opera sounds is really up to the listener.Sharon said there are 11 orchestra members who play music by composer and librettist Christopher Cerrone live in the Harvey Café throughout the whole performance. It is the music from these orchestra members that is fed through the headphones for the audience to hear.“On your headsets, you’re hearing this beautiful symphonic music that’s coming from across the station” Napoli said. “It’s kind of like your walking around listening to an iPod except for there’s 50 other people listening to the same thing at the same time.The opera allows audience members to experience not only opera, but to experience Union Station in new ways as well.“The cool thing is that this forces you to look at the station and the other people in it in a different way than you do when you’re just rushing for a train,” Napoli said. “It’s more curious and tentative, like you’re walking around with no aim.”According to Sharon, new opera is the way to get people back into classical opera. Sharon hopes that people with old ideas of what opera is or who wouldn’t normally enjoy opera will ask themselves if there’s a different form of opera that they might be interested in.“I think there’s an enormous value to the mythical range of the traditional repertoire, but I think that the operatic repertoire needs to constantly be replenished with new ideas,” Sharon said. “Especially here in America I think we have this great opportunity to rewrite a new version and a new idea of opera. We’re not beholden to old ideas the same way. Even through building onto traditions of classical singing and classical ideas, we can create pieces that can really speak to an audience from the ground up.”