Tod is just back from a whirlwind trip to London where he brainstormed with director Braham Murray, his collaborator on Resurrection and Skellig, about new opera and theater concepts, and launched a new project with theater group Punchdrunk (more soon on these soon). But first he swung by the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden – fresh off an overnight transatlantic flight – to test his “personal opera” concept, in anticipation of next summer’s Olympics. The idea was to recruit Londoners who remembered the 1948 Olympics, the last time they were held in London, and to create compactly powerful operas drawn from those memories. Teams from the MIT Media Lab and the Royal Opera House worked with 25 seniors to create and perform 6 remarkable mini-operas in a single day. The launch of “Personal Opera” was deemed a success by all, so it will be full-speed-ahead to do this on a larger scale for the London Summer Olympics in 2012.
Here are some photos of the trip and of the “Personal Opera” workshop from Tod’s iPhone:
Opera of the Future 