The Language of Virtual Reality
Alfred Hitchcock once described the Kuleshov Effect as ‘pure cinematics’. Named after the Russian film theorist, Lev Kuleshov, who first demonstrated the effect in the early 20th century, the technique is a fundamental in film editing. The Kuleshov identifies the idea we, as an audience, may take from the editing of two unrelated images in succession. Hitchcock illustrated this idea by taking a shot of a smiling old man that then cuts to a mother and daughter playing and then comparing this to the same shot of the old man set against a young woman sunbathing. Purely by association, the man is presented as a sociable, friendly gentleman in the first sequence and as a sleazy pervert in the second.
Editing is a language unique to film making. There is no pure equivalent of the Kuleshov effect in theatre, literature or any other medium. Every artistic medium has its own set of parameters to work within, and through those parameters, new and engaging artistic technique can arise. Think of the fourth-wall, self-awareness in the plays of Berthold Brecht or punctuation free, stream of consciousness in Joyce’s final chapter of Ulysses. These ideas can be translated into equivalents in other mediums, but crucially they are equivalents, and not carbon copies, of the original technique.
Opera has its own unique artistic language. As Peter Schaffer wrote in Amadeus: “In a play if more than one person speaks at the same time, it's just noise, no one can understand a word. But with opera, you can have twenty individuals all talking at the same time, and it's not noise, it's a perfect harmony!”. Beyond the logistical benefits, opera has a dramatic pacing that would feel odd in a play. An aria allows space for time to stretch and for a character to be present within a particular moment. Whilst the recit/aria rhythm of the classical period isn’t formally present in the more through-composed opera of today, the echoes of this pacing can still absolutely be found. Time operates in its own way in opera.
In 2022, Irish National Opera premiered the world’s first Virtual Reality Community Opera, ‘Out of the Ordinary/As an gNách’. It’s a work designed in a video game engine that’s experienced in a VR headset, so audience members are totally immersed in a digital world which they can explore by physically moving their body. Plugging opera into VR presents its own new set of creative rules to work with and allows us to tell different kinds of stories, unique to this combination of artistic mediums.
As the producer on ‘Out of the Ordinary/As an gNàch’, I’ve spent the last three years getting acquainted with the world of VR, to identify its potential. One thing I was keen to ensure happened with this project was that we would produce an opera for virtual reality and not a piece of opera that simply happened to be in VR. We had to maximise the medium.
One particularly popular experience in VR is the app ‘Richie’s Plank’: An experience that involves you taking a lift to the top of a skyscraper and walking off a plank. The user can look down to street level and, if they’re feeling brave, can choose to step off the plank and plummet down to the ground. I must have shown this experience to about 100 people and most choose not to step off the blank. The logic of knowing they are on solid ground doesn’t add up to what their eyes can see and so (such is the level of immersion of the experience) the eyes win out over the brain. This is a dynamic unique to VR and definitely plays into some of the work found in ‘Out of the Ordinary/As an gNách’. One standout moment for many audience members has been a section aboard a stormy ship at sea. I’ll leave you to fill in the blanks here.
It is encouraging to see what a natural fit opera is for the world of VR. Returning to the idea of dramatic pacing, VR allows audience to sit in moments and live in these beautiful worlds. The music can give permission for audiences to soak in the details of these carefully sculpted environments, without feeling they are overstaying their welcome. The consideration of placing sounds within a space through the use of ambisonics, also came into play with VR: If a character is in the environment and the user turns their head, the perspective of where the sound is coming from changes as it would in the real world. There is potential for artist in the future to explore these ideas further and subvert audience expectations in a way that wouldn’t be possible in live theatre.
There is also the first-person element of VR. In ‘Out of the Ordinary/As an gNách’ you take on the role of Nalva: how do we communicate this idea to the audience? What should Nalva’s voice sound like if it is in your head? VR allows the audience member to literally see the world through the eyes of another. I think we’ll see many more VR pieces in the future exploring this idea.
‘Out of the Ordinary/As an gNách’ was a three-year process. When we first began work in 2019, we knew that much of technology we would eventually present the piece with was yet to be made available or hadn’t yet been invented. This a rapidly changing industry with new artistic challenges and opportunities arising as a result. The films of Charlie Chaplin are grounded in a time and place due to the limitations of filmmaking technology at the time. This doesn’t mean their artistic quality has reduced, it is just experienced in a very different way by modern audiences in comparison to contemporary ones. Sooner or later, ‘Out of the Ordinary/As an gNách’ will be experienced through a similar lens, and that’s absolutely fine.
James Bingham, Outreach and Studio Producer, Irish National Opera
Find out more about Out of the Ordinary here.