Robert Lepage La Damnation de Faust at the Met Opera
I've long been a big fan of Robert Lepage, and a friend hooked me up with great seats for the final dress rehearsal of La Damnation de Faust at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday. I agree wholeheartedly with a composer friend I ran into at intermission who said, "I've been following Lepage for 15 years and he keeps getting better!" The show is beautiful, and, in typical Lepage fashion, the impressive technology never gets in the way, but instead helps bridge the gap between the audience and the performance. The amazing, beautiful, and truly interactive video by Holger Förterer (who I have interviewed, talked to on the phone, texted, but never actually met!) takes steps well beyond what the team did on Ka. On the Met Opera website there a fantastic video interview with Lepage which also shows some great shots of the stage and technology. It's very short but accurate and shows some good detail, like this shot of the tech table setup:
The show opens this Friday and runs through December 4 (ticket info here). If you cant get to NYC, Faust will be shown live in HD in movie theatres nationally Saturday, November 22, 2008 at 1:00 pm ET. Details on that here.
This looks like a good week for me and new shows using interactive video, because in addition to seeing this Faust production, I'm heading up to Massachusetts to see the interactive stuff on the NIN tour I wrote about here, and get a look backstage.
Update
on 2008-11-07 18:18 by controlgeek
Mostly accurate New York Times article on the technology came out today, link here.