Colloquia
Mary Lou Aleskie, Toni Dove, Wendall Harrington, Dana Karwas, and Ruth Mackenzie
What is the opera house of the future?
WHAT IS THE OPERA HOUSE OF THE FUTURE?
A public debate launchng the Yale School of Architecture’s Advanced Design Studio
Introduced and moderated by Ruth Mackenzie with Mary Lou Aleskie, Toni Dove, Wendall Harrington and Dana Karwas
Is Opera the dinosaur of the arts?
Will the audiences of the future still want a collective live music theater experience?
Can Opera and the magnificent buildings that house it escape the accusation of existing only for a rich elite?
How can the architects and artistic directors of Opera Houses re-invent the buildings and invite new audiences from diverse communities?
What sort of musicians, artists and architects can transform Opera and its Houses in the future?
Where will the opera houses of the future exist and for whom will they be?
Ruth Mackenzie is Visiting Critic at Yale School of Architecture and Artistic Director of Theatre du Chatelet Paris: she has been General Director of Scottish Opera and Manchester International Festival, Artistic Director of Holland Festival Amsterdam, and Director of the London 2012 Festival, the official cultural festival for the London 2012 Olympics & Paralympics.
Mary Lou Aleskie is the Director of the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth where she leads the advancement of arts and creativity. She was formerly the Executive Director of the New Haven-based International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
Toni Dove lives and works in New York. Since the early 1990s, she has produced unique and highly imaginative embodied hybrids of film, installation and performance. In her work, performers and participants interact with an unfolding narrative, using interface technologies such as motion sensing to “perform” on-screen avatars.
Wendall K. Harrington teaches at the Yale School of drama and was described as “the godmother of all projectors” by John Simon in New York Magazine. She has worked in the field of projected media for live events since the mid 1970’s. Ms. Harrington has been lecturing on Projection Design for theater since the early 1990s.
Dana Karwas is the Director of the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media at Yale University. Her creative practice is centered around human reference frames, with a specific interest in the boundaries of sensory perception and rendering the invisible visible.