STAGE WITHOUT FRONTIERS
Yuval Sharon's Mobile Opera Hopscotch Opens Doors of Perception
Yuval Sharon is Ready
You slide into the cosseted depths of the limousine; the door shuts, closing out the fierce noise and buzz of the LA streets. But this sense of separation is a fleeting illusion– you now are more connected than you’ve ever been. Pulling out into the hot grind of downtown traffic, you and your fellow passengers are joining the wider pulse and flow of the city, but there’s something bigger here too. In the car, you’re suddenly immersed in music, by song, by a story that unfolds, that consumes your senses. A sense of deceleration brings you back to your seat. The limo is braking and suddenly you’re walking across hot tarmac to a new limo. There’s music here, a new song, another story, separate yet connected to the first. And thisnew car once more pulls out into the roar of LA downtown traffic…
It is unlike everything you’ve ever seen, heard or experienced before. This is Hopscotch, the latest project from The Industry, a Los Angeles-based experimental opera company lead by creative visionary and director Yuval Sharon that is redefining the nature of not only the operatic art form, but of what it means to perform.
Sharon has a record of shattering norms. His previous project, Invisible Cities, was a wireless headphone opera that took place in Los Angeles´ famous Union Station railway terminal. Invisible Cities integrated audience members into the performance itself, with a performance that travelled through various locations within the terminal, while the audience could choose their perspective by roaming freely through the production.
Over the course of six performances between October 31stand November 15th2015,Hopscotch will see The Industry take the concept of motion, of the freeform opera into a whole other dimension in the world’s first-ever opera to take place in cars. As inspiration, they have looked to LA, a city of operatic scale, a city of cars and roads. A city of adventures. The city is the new stage.
24 limousines, 24 drivers, each taking artists and members of the audience on intimate ten-minute journeys towards mystery destinations. In each car, the work of six different composers is performed by artists that createvariousfragments of amaster narrativewithin the space of every brief trip before the passengers are ushered towards a new car, swapping into a new chapter. The audience progresses through the story as they navigate through the city on three distinct 90-minute routes, while experiencing a patchwork of scenes both inside and outside the vehicles. Creating an unforgettable and intimate experience inside each car, Hopscotch allows each audience member to be the protagonist of their own experience.
In each limousine, cameras and Sennheiser AVX microphones capture these unique slices of narrative, all of which are transmitted and fused into a larger birds-eye perspective of the work, experienced by an audience of 2,500 at the Central Hub, a pop-up outdoor structure at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in downtown Los Angeles. The live-stream of the performances creates a dizzying panorama of life in Los Angeles, allowingeach audience member in the Hub to experience the work their own way, sharing a personal slice of the huge shared journey via Sennheiser’s GuidePort system and MOMENTUM 2headphones.
With the technical support of Sennheiser, Bexel Audio Specialists, and Sound Designer Brett Jarvis, the Central Hub is the physical convergence of the audio and visual, the intimate and the immense.The ultimate terminus of the 24 journeys, all limousines drive towards the Central Hub and one by one, each enter the Hub and the artists and audiences emerge from the car. As each car arrives, the unified chorale becomes larger and louder. The chaotic panorama becomes order, as artists and audiences move from a dizzying, real-time vista of one of the world’s greatest cities to a single point of time and space, to an immediate shared now.
It is like nothing you’ve ever seen, heard or experienced before. This is opera redefined for a new age. This is Hopscotch. Yuval Sharonis ready to go further.
Ready when you are. Go further in sound with MOMENTUM
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The project was inspired by Sennheiser’s MOMENTUM headphones. Their uncompromising focus on perfect sound was the spark for the MOMENTUM project. As with the individuals in the project, Sennheiser has refused to stand still, and with the next generation of MOMENTUM headphones, available in both wired and wireless versions, once again showed an unconditional passion for amazing audio. With high-quality materials, flawless workmanship and ground-breaking technologies, MOMENTUM headphones have won numerous awards and are ready to meet the highest demands: Ready for those who go further. Ready for those who don’t just wear headphones as a fashion item. Ready for those who know, what really counts: superior sound. Go further in sound at
Statement Yuval Sharon
“Both art and technology can imbue everyday life with a sense of undiscovered potential. When the two work hand-in-hand, the awe and wonder it can inspire asks us to consider reality in a new way. It has been a tremendous adventure to work with Sennheiser to erase the boundary of inside and outside a car, and to make the whole city feel more connected than ever.”
About Yuval Sharon and The Industry
“LA’s avant-garde opera darling” (Hollywood Reporter), Yuval Sharon has been creating an unconventional body of work exploring the interdisciplinary potential of opera. His productions have been described as “thrilling” (New York Times), “virtuosic” (Opernwelt), “dizzyingly spectacular” (New York Magazine), “ingenious” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “staggering” (Opera News). Yuval founded and serves as Artistic Director of The Industry, an experimental opera company in Los Angeles.
Hopscotch is the follow-up to The Industry’s widely acclaimed Invisible Cities, which Wired Magazine called “the opera of the future,” a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Music and the subject of an Emmy-winning documentary. The production was named in the Top 10 lists for both Music and Architecture in The Los Angeles Times.
An innovative collaboration with Sennheiser, Invisible Cities gave audience members wireless headphones to discover the singers and dancers among the everyday life of LA’s Union Station. The sold-out production became a cultural sensation in Los Angeles and received international attention, including outlets such as Vogue Magazine, The New York Times, Wired Magazine, Forbes Magazine, Gizmodo, La Repubblica (Italy), ZDF Heute Journal (Germany), and manymore.
Hopscotch is the brainchild of The Industry’s Artistic Director Yuval Sharon and Production Designer Jason H. Thompson, created with six LA-based composers – Andrew McIntosh, Veronika Krausas, Andrew Norman, David Rosenboom, Ellen Reid, and Marc Lowenstein – and six LA-based writers –Tom Jacobson, Mandy Kahn, Sarah LaBrie, Jane Stephens Rosenthal, Janine Salinas Schoenberg, andErin Young.
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