Chapter 2 - 'Librettising' Astrophysics to create The Flowering Desert
2.1 Introduction
2.1 Introduction
The Flowering Desert is a multimedia, immersive opera about the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system. It follows two separate timelines, happening in parallel. One narrative is the timeline of an astrophysicist as they discover TRAPPIST-1, and the other the story of a planet within TRAPPIST-1 as it becomes hospitable for life. This particular system was discovered in 2016 by teams based at the University of Birmingham and Liege, and included as one of its leads the award-winning astrophysicist Dr Amaury Triaud.
This opera was written from January 2020-October 2021 and was performed in May 2022 and January 2023. An excerpt was also performed at the UK Astronomy Meeting in Warwick Arts Centre with the See The Sun installation in July 2022. It is composed by Daniel Blanco Albert with a libretto by myself. During the process we collaborated with filmmaker Tadas Stalyga, costume and movement designer Alexander Kaniewski, projectionist Leon Trimble and art students from the Birmingham School of Art. It was performed in the Birmingham ThinkTank Planetarium with the collaboration of the ThinkTank lead Colin Hutcheson. We were commissioned to perform the work as part of the Commonwealth Games Culture Programme for University of Birmingham, after having collaborated with the astrophysicist Dr Amaury Triaud. The performers were funded by the University of Birmingham as part of their Commonwealth Games programme for the performance in May 2022, and by M4C for the performance and recording in January 2023.
The choice to focus on the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system and the science behind its discovery was a natural progression from the previous work I had done on Entanglement! An Entropic Tale, prior to the PhD as mentioned above (see section 1.2.e and Appendix AP 3.1). I had been working a lot with physics due to my background studying Physics and Philosophy and working as a secondary school physics teacher. I wanted to find a topic which would be a bit more focused than the broad range of physics covered in my previous work, and so the easy accessibility of the scientists engaged in the discovery of TRAPPIST-1 provided an ideal focus for a new work. Daniel and I already had connections to the University of Birmingham physics department, having become part of their PhyArt hub.