Out of the Ordinary/As an nGnách: The world’s first VR community opera

Organisations

Irish National Opera, Ireland

As Ireland's national opera company, INO produces high-quality, accessible opera in venues throughout Ireland and overseas.

www.irishnationalopera.ie

Project

Created through a series of online and in-person workshops, Out of the Ordinary/As an nGnách is the world’s first virtual reality community opera. The project explores new methods of co-creation, placing communities at the centre of the opera creation process. 

Participants

Over 130 participants from all over Ireland of all ages and profiles, including secondary school students, over-65s and inhabitants of Inis Meáin, a small island off the west coast of Ireland.

Key persons

James Bingham, Producer

Project outcomes

  • Included over 130 community participants and has been seen by over 700 people so far through touring

  • Produced the world’s first virtual reality community opera

  • Nominated in the ‘Digital Opera’ category at the International Opera Awards

  • Winner of the 2021 FEDORA Digital Prize 

Context

Creating an entirely new opera in an incredibly experimental medium was a challenge in and of itself. The fact that it was a community-led project, some of which was to be conducted through the Irish language, made this a complex project from the outset. The project started during the Covid-19 pandemic, which added to the complications. In the midst of a global pandemic, we met our participants the only way we knew how... through Zoom. Reaching out to new friends via community partners in Music Generation Offaly/Westmeath, The Civic Theatre, Tallaght and Conradh na Gaeilge, we met with enthusiastic creative-minded people from the west coast of Ireland to the suburbs of Dublin. Over 6 months we hosted a series of online workshops exploring all types of creativity relevant to opera: music, visual design, writing.

Approach

When restrictions allowed, we were finally able to meet in person bringing our participants together with a team of creative professionals to get to work on the opera. During the in-person workshops, we began to explore the themes that had come up again and again during the online workshops: love, grief, change, belonging, journeys, the supernatural, climate change and more. During the autumn of 2021, the professional creative team worked to distil the materials from all the community work done to date, resulting in a clear storyline and musical direction for the opera. Regular online meetings with our community ensured they stayed at the centre of the process, sharing feedback and suggestions as the work developed. 

An amazing feature of VR technology is that it can be used to record the movement of people which can then be incorporated into a VR experience. All our participants enjoyed exploring VR and we wanted this to be reflected in the final opera. We worked with Virtual Reality Ireland and our creative production partners, Algorithm, to run motion capture workshops, capturing movements of community members to be translated to character animations in our virtual world. 

Community choirs were set up in Inis Meáin and in Dublin, alongside Tallaght Choral Society, to rehearse and record the choral elements of the work, marking the first time many of the community members had taken part in a formal choir setting. Alongside professional singers, the community choirs perform part of the music and soundscape of the opera. Along with creative partners at Algorithm, director Jo Mangan got to work creating our virtual world, bringing together the narrative, composition and visual elements from the process so far to realise Out of the Ordinary/As an nGnách in the 3D environment of VR.Professional musicians were brought into the process to workshop the score before the final recording sessions took place, involving professional and non-professional musicians in the process.

Results

These processes over a period of three years resulted in a fully immersive, 20 minute long, 360-degree, virtual reality experience. In the summer of 2022, we were able to tour it to three festivals in Ireland and incorporate private screenings to key stakeholders and arts professionals in the EU and America. In 2023 we are planning a nationwide tour, working with local arts venues to bring this experience to every county in Ireland.

Lessons learned:

  • Flexibility – projects must be built to suit the changing needs of the community we work with.

  • Thinking outside the box in terms of traditional opera production – standard production models do not work in this context, so time was needed for this consideration.

  • Importance of clear communication – a project in a medium as new as this once is complex to communicate, so good channels communication is a priority.

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