Multimedia Opera No-Opera, "AH!"

The Redcat hosted the multimedia event "AH!" this past Friday, a self-described "opera no-opera" divided into chapters such as "Intergalactic Archeologists", "The Story of Being Invisible" and "Measurement-Tallying Divinity". The audience was invited to take off its shoes and sit on the comfortably padded floor, circling the musicians, actors and their high-tech gadgets. There was a laser piano, a U.F.O-esque, sound-enabling laser globe and cameras, which took turns interacting with modern dancers and assaulting the audience (in a good way). But there was also the embarrassingly obsolete presence of pre-digital age instruments like violins, trumpets and, gasp, the human voice. In fact, while the raison d'etre of this "iPhone opera" was its multi-layering of cutting-edhe technology, its most truly necessary and fascinating elements were the ones that escaped "digital" labels.

The audience could apparently influence the performance before, after and during the event by uploding poetry online and in situ (see photo). It also served as video fodder as a cameraperson zoomed in on the viewers' faces, projecting the image -- or its fatly pixeled translation -- onto the floor of the space. Which is the kind of video usage in theatre that doesn't make you want to jam a pencil into your eye, but doesn't point to groundbreaking innovation either.

"AH!" could have actually done away with most of its fancy digitality, kept its chaotic, inspiring barrage of poetry lines and it would have been just as great of an "opera", although perhaps not an iPhone one. Apart from some new-agey nonsense ("synchrony grows as entities gather") some of its poems seemed to echo a lot of the issues we have dealt with in Techno-Cultures. They reflected on "the incalculable", on what may happen when "your communication system vastly differs from that of different life forms", whether something without meaning can make a mark and if there is anyone out there who is not a "casualty". But for all the interactive promises of this multimedia event the viewer felt strangely empty-handed, as if we ultimately needed to touch something that triggers the course of something else in order to feel like participants.