Chapter 2 - 'Librettising' Astrophysics to create The Flowering Desert
2.1 Introduction
2.4.a Using the Planetarium
From the start of the process we knew we would be making use of the ThinkTank Planetarium in Birmingham, an unusual and subject-specific performance space. As such the space and the audience within it play a vital role in the conversion of the physics into an operatic performance.
The planetarium is an ideal space in which to present a work that seeks to enable the audience to deeply experience the subjects in this research. The performers rotate through the peripheral sightlines of the audience, making them a more elusive and supporting aspect of the piece, with the dome as the central focus. The musicians are also placed around the audience which, alongside the pre-recorded elements in the 5.1 speaker system, created a surround sound audio experience. As such the audience is a key feature of the space, becoming the point around which everything else rotates. This helped a lot in creating a deeper potentially hyper-immersive experience for the audience, and one that could attempt to go beyond merely putting the audience into the environment of the opera, instead making the audience’s presence and cooperation a key part of that environment. The constant sensation of being in a rotating system from both a visual and auditory perspective, designing the music, placement of instruments, movement of the performers and projections to enhance this, aimed to help stimulate the audience's loss of distinction between fiction and reality, heightening the suspension of disbelief towards the fictional characters and scenarios presented. The more the audience accepts their environment and becomes part of the system the more they are allowing themselves to be shaped by the performance and anthropomorphised in the process. Just as through the discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system the planets and star itself were actors in a network which affected and altered Dr Amaury Triaud’s understanding of the world around him, and even further impacted the ways in which astrophysics is approached by scientists, the performance as a whole (that is, the sensory experience of the multimedia operatic performance) is an actor which has the ability to reshape the views and understandings of the audience perceiving it. Through the story, music and scenery, the audience can better or even hyper-immerse themselves in the fictional (although built out of scientific research) worlds of the Measurer and the TRAPPIST-1 system.
One element we found to be vital to the audience’s full engagement and enjoyment of the work in the dome was to implement subtitling throughout. This was done easily in the mélodrames and scene 2, as they were performed to a click track. However, in the other scenes I condensed the sung text to the most important, or poetic, sections. These were then embedded into the projections at key moments where it would not make a difference if they were being sung at the same time by the performers. In a further performance of the work I would suggest performing the whole piece to a click track to allow for all subtitles to be in line with the sung material.
In the following sections I will provide detail on some of the decisions made for the narrative and characters, explaining how they relate to the science, the archetypes and the collaborative process.