A Man and His Machine
Dallas Opera's high-tech Death and the Powers gears up for worldwide exposure
The Dallas Opera usually presents its shows during the course of several weeks. But Death and the Powers, starting Wednesday, February 12 at Winspear Opera House, has a short-but-sweet run with only four performances through Sunday.
The opera promises to be a memorable one, as it tells the story of a terminally ill billionaire who downloads his consciousness into “the System” and proceeds to use all his powers to persuade his loved ones to join him there.
The Dallas Opera is pulling out all the stops to make sure people stand up and take notice of this production. Sunday's performance will be simulcast to locations around the world:
- The National Opera Center at Opera America in New York City
- The San Francisco Conservatory of Music in San Francisco
- The Industry at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles
- The Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, California
- Opera Philadelphia at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- The MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts
- The Royal Academy of Music in London, England
- The University College of Opera and Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden
The performance will also be simulcast for free at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, although the 298-seat Hoglund Foundation Theater has long since sold out. If you don't have a ticket, you still have a chance to get in, because the Perot is choosing people from a stand-by line to fill empty seats 35 minutes before the performance starts.
If standing in line isn't your thing, and you can't make any of the four performance — for which tickets are still available — don't fret. The stay of Death and the Powers will be extended, in a sense, with a display of the production's Sensor Chair at the Perot Museum as part of the museum's Engineers Week, taking place February 17-21.
The chair, created by the MIT Media Lab, is a unique way for people to interactively experience the world of opera. Anyone who sits in it finds that his movements, small or large, create a variety of operatic sounds accompanied by lights.
Those attending the opera can experience the chair in the Winspear lobby before it heads to the Perot's Texas Instruments Engineering and Innovation Hall.
