Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: Audience involvement is at the heart of the Polyopera project  

Three weeks, three miniature epics in the realm of opera - this is Polyopera. A collaboration between artist collective Polyartistry and Opera Australia, the purpose of the project is to bring opera to new audiences and locations in Sydney.

We're at the halfway mark of the project now and things are progressing well. Last week's La bohème: Bohemian Deconstruction featured soprano Taryn Fiebig performing a new work, commissioned for the project from Drew Crawford, to an enthusiastic, costumed crowd at CuriousWorks in Surry Hills. As I write now, our headquarters at Opera Australia are full of people folding paper flowers for our version of Lakmé - Lakmé: Parramatta Imaginings - and Laura, our resident director, is racing off to an afternoon with MC Rima aka Soulbeats and Morganics for Don Giovanni Remixed aka The Don.

A large part of this project involves crowd-sourced creative elements, the idea being that giving people encounters with their own creativity makes them more receptive to the creativity in others, and therefore a more engaged audience. Each of our operas has focussed on a different kind of activity along these lines, be it libretto contributions (or lines for our Hip Hop Battle out at Blacktown as part of The Don this Friday 17 June), sharing photos and stories, or coming along to our live performance events to be part of the film set.

Workshop events, like a BBoy dance workshop and beat boxing workshop, and a massed contemporary dance workshop, form part of a number of additional events and call-outs that encourage people to get involved in the operas in some way. The end product will be three video operas to be released on YouTube on Wednesday 29 June.

Get involved and have your own moment of opera stardom www.polyopera.com!

Further links

Drew Crawford - AMC profile
Polyopera.com