About the Opera
The House is Open is a new electro-acoustic opera written and composed by Alexander Vassos, directed by Marina McClure and Deena Selenow. The opera blends instrumental orchestration, electronic soundscapes, arias, and spoken text to explore the facade of domestic, suburban life through the eyes of prepubescent children on the verge of awakening. Listen to "The Splinter," a sneak peek preview!
The story centers on Charley, a young boy who has spent most of his life asleep and dreaming. As he wakes and is reintroduced to his family, the drama slowly transforms into a surreal dreamscape: his pubescent sister Sophia reveals an incestuous determination, his parents become oracular Earth-Mother/Sky-Father archetypes, and he is visited by distorted and nightmarish characters. The audience travels with Charley into this abstract psychological dreamscape. The orchestration, design, and direction work in concert to bring the audience in and out of the action, fragmenting the visual, auditory, and experiential aspects of the performance. The resulting immersive experience offers the audience a chance to understand how the external world impacts Charley’s inner emotional and psychological world.
The opera experiments with several musical cultural traditions; it is a hybrid of the organizational principals of Modernist compositional practices, Straussina thematic treatment, Spectralism, and Musique Concrète. It employs a wide-range of innovative playing techniques that composer Alexander Vassos has pioneered.
To create the “waking-sleep” environment for both the characters and the audience, concrète sounds are manipulated and mixed formally and theatrically: a scene at the ocean is accompanied by a fully composed electronic score of sounds of waves, and an interminable elevator ride is accompanied by rising Shepard tones in the string instruments and electronically scored ringing elevator bells. At the climax of the opera, Charley's heart and breath are amplified and mixed into the soundscape, bringing the audience up close to Charley's personal experience. The very organization of the opera is designed to resonate with and through the audience to offer an interactive journey with the characters.
To excavate the dark side of domesticity and place the audience in an immersive environment, we have taken inspiration from Gregory Crewdson’s photographs of constructed scenes (please see supporting materials). The shell of Charley’s suburban house provides an unsettling place for family life to unfold. The theatricality and falseness of the space is highlighted through the “sound-stage quality” of the set: exposed backs of flats, unconcealed backstage, and green screens.
The design utilizes distortions—in scale, number, and directionality—to tackle the rapid shifts of location and impossible stage directions Charley’s nightmare demands. The hills of glass in The Sweeper scene are created through a live-feed camera that captures a single, small pile of broken glass placed on a pedestal. The image is then replicated, distorted and played back through projections and green-screen effects built into the flats of our set. As the nightmare builds, so too do the distortions. Mother’s woolen dress lengthens and runs up the wall as she swells before Charley’s eyes. At the climax, the entire space instantly disappears into a black abyss, sweeping the audience along with Charley.
With The House is Open, we are overhauling the traditional manner of staging opera by placing the audience inside an immersive surround-sound system, rather using a traditional frontal presentation of sound. We hope to forge a new identity for what opera is and can be. We seek to bring diversity to the traditional opera audience—creating a new interest among our peers and in the greater community.
The story centers on Charley, a young boy who has spent most of his life asleep and dreaming. As he wakes and is reintroduced to his family, the drama slowly transforms into a surreal dreamscape: his pubescent sister Sophia reveals an incestuous determination, his parents become oracular Earth-Mother/Sky-Father archetypes, and he is visited by distorted and nightmarish characters. The audience travels with Charley into this abstract psychological dreamscape. The orchestration, design, and direction work in concert to bring the audience in and out of the action, fragmenting the visual, auditory, and experiential aspects of the performance. The resulting immersive experience offers the audience a chance to understand how the external world impacts Charley’s inner emotional and psychological world.
The opera experiments with several musical cultural traditions; it is a hybrid of the organizational principals of Modernist compositional practices, Straussina thematic treatment, Spectralism, and Musique Concrète. It employs a wide-range of innovative playing techniques that composer Alexander Vassos has pioneered.
To create the “waking-sleep” environment for both the characters and the audience, concrète sounds are manipulated and mixed formally and theatrically: a scene at the ocean is accompanied by a fully composed electronic score of sounds of waves, and an interminable elevator ride is accompanied by rising Shepard tones in the string instruments and electronically scored ringing elevator bells. At the climax of the opera, Charley's heart and breath are amplified and mixed into the soundscape, bringing the audience up close to Charley's personal experience. The very organization of the opera is designed to resonate with and through the audience to offer an interactive journey with the characters.
To excavate the dark side of domesticity and place the audience in an immersive environment, we have taken inspiration from Gregory Crewdson’s photographs of constructed scenes (please see supporting materials). The shell of Charley’s suburban house provides an unsettling place for family life to unfold. The theatricality and falseness of the space is highlighted through the “sound-stage quality” of the set: exposed backs of flats, unconcealed backstage, and green screens.
The design utilizes distortions—in scale, number, and directionality—to tackle the rapid shifts of location and impossible stage directions Charley’s nightmare demands. The hills of glass in The Sweeper scene are created through a live-feed camera that captures a single, small pile of broken glass placed on a pedestal. The image is then replicated, distorted and played back through projections and green-screen effects built into the flats of our set. As the nightmare builds, so too do the distortions. Mother’s woolen dress lengthens and runs up the wall as she swells before Charley’s eyes. At the climax, the entire space instantly disappears into a black abyss, sweeping the audience along with Charley.
With The House is Open, we are overhauling the traditional manner of staging opera by placing the audience inside an immersive surround-sound system, rather using a traditional frontal presentation of sound. We hope to forge a new identity for what opera is and can be. We seek to bring diversity to the traditional opera audience—creating a new interest among our peers and in the greater community.