Immersion

I recently saw a program on PBS about an opera that was performed in 2013 at the Los Angeles Union Station. It wasn’t that long ago that we’d gone down to Union Station using the Metro Link and had a tour, so there was a lot in the show that we’d seen. The “story” was based on the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and adapted as an opera by Christopher Cerrone. It showed an imaginary conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

The show was performed inside and in the courtyards of Union Station while travelers and others were in the station. They experienced a partial performance. There was an audience that wore special wireless headphones that heard everything. The music was being performed in one gallery while the actors and dancers moved about the whole area. That audience could move about the area too and each person experienced the show from their own point of view.

So each person, whether in the official audience or merely people passing through the performance became, in essence, a part of the show. They were immersed in the experience.

People, who were not part of the official audience would find themselves, for a moment, to be part of the story; perhaps an unwitting witness or even participant. No one, either as official or unofficial audience, could experience the whole show.

This is really true of life. None of us get the whole story. We only get the part taking place near us. Even when someone tells us of their own experience we get it from them, but filtered by our own perspectives. Try as we might, we can’t always understand the world from someone else’s shoes.

There in the middle of a huge city, surrounded by travelers and the homeless, the audience wandered through the edges of a story about travel and our destinations.

As a writer I was quite intrigued by this technique and would love to find some way to use it myself. Unless I could get a grant, there’s no way that I could do anything of that magnitude. But like so many things, constraints are quite conducive to forcing creativity, so now is the time to try to think of what story I’d like to tell, or at least partially tell.

If you would like to let me know what you think, send me an email at [email protected]. If you would like links to additional information visit my blog at http://mathnerde.blogspot.com/.