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TAP:EX Augmented Opera

Augmented Opera

Music by Benton Roark | Co-created by Debi Wong, Benton Roark, Michael Hidetoshi Mori | Co-directed by Debi Wong, Michael Hidetoshi Mori | Music Directed by Michael Shannon

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“Welcome to Elysium, a new technology that uploads your happiest memories for a boutique post-death experience!”

TAP:EX Augmented Opera, delves into the world of analog and digital storytelling augmentation, challenging our notion of what is real. TAP:EX Augmented Opera invites us to submerge ourselves in a night of experiential and experimental opera. 

Conceived by Tapestry Opera’s Artistic Director Michael Hidetoshi Mori, composer Benton Roark, and co-director Debi Wong, TAP:EX Augmented Opera explores the ways we experience memories: how they are sometimes completely sensory, how specific ones haunt us, and how they change over lifetimes. We live in a world that pushes us to extend or augment our lived experiences through technology. This TAP:EX explores all of these mnemonic possibilities framed through a Silicon Valley product launch. The audience is invited as the first guests to learn about Elysium, a new cloud-based technology that reimagines the afterlife as a perfect curation of our best memories. 

Vanessa Oude-Reimerink, Lyndsay Promane, Lauren Segal (last seen as M’dea in M’Dea Undone), and pianist Michael Shannon bring TAP:EX Augmented Opera to life. The three singers embody different aspects of our heroine Eurydice’s memory; they are fantasy futures she did not live, raw experiences she never processed. These powerhouse performers represent layers of perception, triggered by the happy memory uploader, Elysium. 

Genre-defying composer Benton Roark is a two-time participant in Tapestry Opera’s LIBLAB intensive and was commissioned for the very first TAP:EX, Revolutions in an exploration of physical theatre.. Other work commissioned by Tapestry Opera includes the site-specific, Bandits in the Valley. Roark’s style has been described as “divergent” and “trippy” (Vancouver Observer) and “ardent and soaring” (The National Post). 

Debi Wong is a Canadian mezzo-soprano, actor and stage-director and also the founder and artistic director of Vancouver-based opera company re:Naissance, where her adaption of Handel’s Acis & Galatea was named one 2017’s best operatic productions in Vancouver by Vancouver Classical Music. 

TAP:EX Augmented Opera is co-directed by Michael Hidetoshi Mori and Debi Wong, and hosted at the dynamic venue of Sidewalk Labs’ experimental workspace on the Waterfront. Audiences are invited to come early and explore Sidewalk’s bold new urban technologies as well as an early prototype of OrpheusVR, a virtual reality opera in development with re:Naissance Opera (Vancouver).

In association with re:Naissance Opera

Sidewalk Labs

307 Lake Shore Blvd. E., Toronto, ON M5A 1C1

Creators

Cast

Creative Team

  • Jacqueline Costa: Set and lighting design
  • Guillermo Subauste: Sound design
  • Lisa Traini: Stage Manager
  • Wes Babcock: Production Manager