A New Urgency OPERA 2018, at Estabelecimento Prisional de Leiria - Jovens (Prision) © SAMP used by permission For thirty years, Jonathan Dove has been composing community operas with and for non-professional performers. His reflective essay on his experience – which is now available as a downloadable PDF – offers rich insights into changing practice and his own evolving ideas. The tension he identifies, between local specificities and universal themes, is at the heart of many community art projects and, in different ways, the three Traction trials. [...]

The Monster in the Maze More than a year ago, as part of the new educational program Liceu Aprèn, the Gran Teatre del Liceu decided to promote a participatory opera project in order to give high school students the opportunity to participate in the process of creating an opera with a professional artistic team: El Monstre al laberint – The Monster in the Maze, with music by Jonathan Dove and a libretto by Alasdair Middleton.This is not the first time that LICEU has involved young [...]

Who needs community opera? Part Three: It could be a model of international collaboration Jonathan Dove Jonathan Dove, The Monster in the Maze, 2015 production by the Berlin Philharmonic, photograph by Monika Rittershaus, courtesy of Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker I sometimes ruefully observe that, whatever I do, Benjamin Britten got there first and did it better: mainstage opera, television opera, church opera, children’s opera, community opera. But he didn’t live to see the internet – here was my opportunity to do something first! Britten also didn’t [...]

Who needs community opera? Part Two: Telling a universal story Jonathan Dove Jonathan Dove, The Monster in the Maze, 2015production by the Berlin Philharmonic, photograph by Monika Rittershaus, courtesy of Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker One drawback to co-creating operas with their community performers is that you can end up with pieces so precisely tailored to their communities, in the stories they tell and the forces they use, that no-one else will perform them. All that creative endeavour may yield just one glorious moment: a week of [...]

Who needs community opera? Part One: ‘Let’s take over a whole town!’ Jonathan Dove Jonathan Dove, In Search of Angels, 1995 © Richard Davies courtesy of Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. ‘Let’s take over a whole town!’ I suggested to Glyndebourne in 1988. ‘Everyone can be in an opera.’ I have been writing community operas for thirty years. At first, it was co-creation, shared with hundreds and hundreds of people. Eventually it led to an ambitious attempt at a networked performance of a community opera on three continents. [...]

TRACTION at Cornell Tech, New York (Image source: pixabay.com) The XR Access Initiative kicked off in Summer 2019 with the first XR Access Symposium. Over 120 technologists, advocates, researchers, and industry leaders joined us for talks, demos, and working group sessions that generated actionable plans for making XR more accessible. At the 2020 XR Access Symposium on July 20th, the community progress over the past year will be reviewed, highlight the latest advancements in XR accessibility research and implementation, and lay out concrete steps we can [...]

NEM SUMMIT 2020 Virtual Conference. 30th June - 2nd July 2020 Dr. Mikel Zorrilla, Director of Digital Media at Vicomtech, has presented his paper “A Novel production Workflow and Toolset for Opera Co-creation Towards Enhanced Societal Inclusion of People” The NEM Summit is an international conference and exhibition focused on Media, Content and Creativity fields, which has been held since 2008. Over the years, the NEM Summit has grown to become a relevant annual event, providing attendees with a key opportunity to meet and network [...]

IEEE IWCMC Conference (International conference on Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing) Virtual Conference. June 15th-16th, 2020 Anderson Smiscuka of Dublin City University, has presented his paper “Performance Evaluation of a Multi-User Virtual Reality Platform”, at the IEEE IWCMC Conference Online. (Image source ddd.uab.cat) This year marked the 16th anniversary of The Annual International Conference on Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing (IWCMC 2020) under the theme of “Internet of Everything“. In recent years, it has attracted the technical community from all around the world, sealing [...]

Searching for Play-Doh James Bingham, Irish National Opera (Image source: pixabay.com)Back in the 1950s, the future for Kutol Products was looking pretty bleak. Their flagship product of wallpaper cleaner was becoming redundant as the usage of coal in households fell rapidly, thereby removing the issue of soot build-up on walls. Remarkably, the company turned around its fortune through the help of Kay Zufall, a nursery school teacher and relative of an employee at Kutol, who read an article about how wallpaper cleaner can be used in modelling. Its [...]

International Conference “From So Far to So Close. Addressing the Refugee Phenomenon: History, Sociology, Technology” TRACTION will be presented by Project Leader Mikel Zorrilla at the international online conference “From So Far to So Close”, addressing the Refugee Phenomenon: History, Sociology, Technology” (SO-CLOSE project logo) The conference was due to be held face-to-face in Barcelona and will now take place in an online format on June 15th and 16th. It will be led by Javier Rodrigo (UAB), leader of the European project Enhancing Social Cohesion [...]