5 High-Tech Operas That Radically Transform the Stage | Diane | Fast Company

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Tonight begins the run of the Metropolitan Opera's Damnation of Faust, designed by Canadian powerhouse designer Robert Lepage and his Ex Machina troupe. We promise to give you a run-down of the opera's blitz of techno-imagery on Monday. Meanwhile, here are five high-tech operas that, depending on your tilt, either jar or excite the senses.

The Magic Flute

South African artist and visual director William Kentridge wowed audiences with his experimental, cinematic staging of Mozart's The Magic Flute in Belgium in 2005 and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2007. Rendering the stage a landscape of animated projections and artwork timed to correspond to singers' movements and arias, he made the opera closer to a video work. Animations come from Kentridge's "erasures"--black-and-white drawings of silhouettes, birds, and apartheid-era South African subjects that are photographed, erased, redrawn, and then animated to give a grainy, flip book-style pace to the action on-stage. An aria, for example, is punctuated by line drawings worming across the cosmos. Kentridge also added a structure that resembles the interior of a camera on-stage--to parallel the crypt in the story. And, ever self-referential, he projects a film, a kind of visual overture, onto a blackboard sitting on an easel. Check out a cool video here.

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