Object Collection: Innova

Tickets and Information

Visit the Object Collection: Innova website:
http://www.incubatorarts.org/otherforces.html

Written/Directed by Kara Feely
Composed by Travis Just

Innova is an experimental opera set within an urban grotto that evokes a cosmopolitan vision of decay and resonantly colliding languages. Five vocalists maintain an extensive live/work space that functions as a site for invented and revised topographies. Sifting through a baroque landscape of objects, tools, and scale models of unusual landmarks, the performers transform the stimulus around them into intricate sequences of action, diagrammatic displays, and a vigorous instrumental score.

Dissolving the boundary between the innovative and the residual, the text is constructed from a collage of sources, from gangster films to architectural theory, plagiarized performance art, and Chinese cooking ingredients. While the performer/vocalists engage in a range of pastimes, projects, and unconventional vocal techniques such as notated speech and rhythmic whispering, live projected video refracts their activity across the greater room.

The score is influenced by a range of music subcultures, from hip-hop/dancehall's booming sub-bass to updated musique concrete, noise-rock and experimental improvised music. In addition to the five vocalists, Innova will be performed by three musicians on cello, guitar, bass, woodwinds, percussion, piano, samples, field recordings, and assorted objects. Featuring an international cast of performers, Innova includes text in English as well as Turkish, German, French, Spanish and Hebrew, with English subtitles.