Traction – Regular Marvels

Virtual Realities, Part One

If you invite people to co-create a Virtual Reality opera no one has the first idea what you have in mind.

It was the end of a long day. We’d run out of time and the guards needed to get us

Three days ago, anticipating the first performance of the Leiria prison opera, I wrote that I didn’t expect to see

In the dusty hall of a disused prison workshop, 30 people shuffle into a big circle. Silence falls. They draw

A long journey needs resting points It is a surprise, in my sixties, to find myself working on opera, as

As the pandemic recedes—or perhaps becomes normalised—it is becoming hard to recall the strangeness of those lockdown months, and the

It’s just over two years since I met the people involved in the Traction co-creation opera projects, in Donostia, at

For decades, longer even, cultural policy in Europe has been imagined as a conflict between two ideas. The first is

There are moments in every good community art project when you watch, suspended between wonder and terror, as it takes

This photograph of the artists working on Irish National Opera’s Out of the Ordinary project was taken on 20 August 2021, at