The Finnish National Opera and Ballet and the digital culture festival Assembly are calling for teams to propose creative technological concepts that take live performance to new heights. This is an invitation to re-imagine the experience of opera performance in the age of omnipresent digitality.
Can you envision how a live show can be augmented digitally? How could you allow the audience members to be immersed into the story itself?
This open call invites you to propose creative technological concepts that take live shows to new heights. Your concept can utilise any new technology or a combination of them – adding interactivity, immersion or inspiration in the show in new ways.
This experimentation will be in the context of CircOpera 2.0, a new performance mixing opera, circus and immersive technology. The stage performance, premiering in Autumn 2022, will include acts with acrobatics, jugglers, somersaults through the air and multiple opera arias, all coming together as CircOpera 2.0.
The organisers are looking for immersive solutions at both small and large scales. The production budget for small scale solutions can be between 5000–30,000€ and for bigger scale solutions between 30,000–200,000€. The production budget should include the team’s salary.
From among the applicants, a group of finalists will be chosen to continue to develop their concept with a team of experts and mentors over August-September 2021, working online/remotely. They will also produce a demo or a proof of concept of their idea.
The competition will culminate at Assembly festival in autumn 2021 where the finalists are invited on stage to pitch and actually show a demo of how they envision their project will come alive.
The finalists will potentially have the opportunity to have their idea come alive on the main stage in 2022 and be part of the creative process of the main stage performance. In addition, the finalists will be awarded with cash prizes.
