A socially distanced RISE Opera
Personal Pandemic
“Personal Pandemic” offers an original take on the human impact of COVID-19 in a unique desktop opera format. The opera, which was recorded with iPhones and other remote recorders during the pandemic, freely mixes hip-hop, chamber music and electroacoustics in a truly 21st century media-savvy opera experience for the viewer/listener. The opera lasts 24 minutes, and features 3 of Montréal’s most impressive singers: sopranos Fredericka Petit-Homme and Marie-Annick Béliveau and rapper Naïka Champaïgne.
The seemingly peripheral, but disarmingly forceful undercurrent of a collective feeling and movement away from technology and back to living in co-composition with nature
Returning to the Trees: The technological burnout crisis
RISE’s “Returning to the Trees” explores “the seemingly peripheral, but disarmingly forceful undercurrent of a collective feeling and movement away from technology and back to living in co-composition with nature” (Sheena Bernett).
In this collective creation, participants were instructed to collaboratively (with each other and their environment) create instruments using what is found at hand and/or bring orchestral/acoustic instruments (cello, horns, etc….including voices) that were to be used in non-traditional ways to mimic sounds felt in that setting. The shape of the ‘piece’ was devised by the participants listening to and observing their surroundings and then becoming part of the environmental tapestry.
A collective micro-opera about online and offline identity confusions in the age of VR, social media and cyber life. (based on an idea proposed by Pablo Flores)
Cyber Identity Crisis
The performance took place November 26th 2021 at the Oscar Peterson Concert Hall, Montreal with a small pandemic-era audience.
The performance began in darkness and the stage was decentralized, with performers distributed around a blindfolded audience.
A collectively-improvised, intersensory opera that enacts a lucid dream state
Why Do We Dream?
Why do we dream?
Concept by Valentina Plata
A collectively-improvised, intersensory opera that enacts a lucid dream state.
Created by RISE (reflective iterative scenario enactments) and
CLOrk (Concordia Laptop Orchestra)
Performed at Concordia University, LePARC (Performing arts research cluster) of the Milieux Institute, March 17th 2022
A distributed mini-opera about how technology fails us
LOST_CONNECTION
A distributed mini-opera about how technology fails us (performed Thursday, 7 April 2022)
Envisioned by Juanita Marchand Knight and co-created with the RISE team and the Concordia Laptop Orchestra (CLOrk), this mini-opera performance took place in four locations in Montreal (Concordia’s 4th space and three apartments), enacting technological crises in four time periods:
Act 1: Lost Formats/Lost Art (1980s-1990s)
Act 2: Y2K and the end of everything as we thought we knew it (2000)
Act 3: the social network and the afterlife (2020s)
Act 4: Lost connection and posthumanism (2040s)