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Dido & Aeneas
Music by Henry Purcell, libretto by Nahum Tate. Directed and conducted by Nikolas Sean-Paul Nackley. Produced by San Francisco State University, April, 2023.
The performance venue was a large band-rehearsal room. In a setup resembling 2022's Ariodante, three 4' 10" x 6' 6" LED panels were hung behind the stage platform. Gaps between center and side panels provided spaces for entrances and exits. Panel pixel dimensions were 384w x 512h, and I combined video for all three panels into a single 1920 x 512 frame. SFSU staff handled loading the video files into a computer and building the show. Projection software was QLab.
As an experiment, I used DALL-E to generate ancient Carthage interiors and boats. The character images were taken from photographs of the singers processed by the website newprofilepic.com.
Director Nackley's concept was the opera as a video game with playable characters Dido, Aeneas, and Belinda. The witches in the story are hackers who attack the game and dump computer code on the screens. It all worked surprisingly well.
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