Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Irish National Opera has been working closely with several communities in Ireland to produce what may be the world’s first virtual reality community opera, as part of Traction: an EU funded research project that explores opera co-creation as a pathway for social inclusion. The project consortium are developing new digital technology to facilitate co-creation between professionals and non-professional artists. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, all co-creation activity with communities has taken place online with challenges and opportunities. Alina Striner from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica will present how community members have used a pilot co-creation tool to develop ideas in workshop sessions with professional artists. This tool, ‘Co-creation Space’, enables participants to upload creative material onto a central platform, view fellow participant’s work and provide feedback to one another. James Bingham from Irish National Opera will discuss the content of the workshops and their relationship to the Co-creation Space as well as how these workshops were conceived to work appropriately in an online context. The workshops themselves were led by Finola Merivale, composer of the virtual reality community opera, and focus on compositional processes. Participants contribute audio files at the end of each workshops and these are used, both directly and indirectly, in the composition of the final opera, which will tour Ireland in 2022. Participants are adults living in Tallaght, a district of south Dublin, young people from the rural midlands and Irish speakers in one of the Aran Islands.