“The Child Who Didn’t Want to Grow Up” becomes the protagonist of the first interactive trans-media opera, which uses new technologies to make the audience an integral part of the performance: with Peter Pan, Sergio Monterisi (composer) and Magali Thomas (director) have taken on the challenge of bringing the operatic genre closer to a wider audience by integrating traditional musical language and digital technologies. Peter Pan marks an absolute novelty in the world of opera: new because it is trans-media, interactive, and collaborative.
While retaining the codes of lyrical performance, Peter Pan also adopts the language of the virtual world and video games. The traditional “hard” sets are completely replaced by a fantastic universe made of projections and 2D and 3D animations.
Thanks to the Peter Pan 3.0 app available for download on smartphones, the audience becomes an actor: they receive light and sound effects that immerse them in the opera’s virtual world and can participate in a large collective video game during two scenes of the performance. The conductor and singers interact in real time with the 3D animated projections and connected LED bracelets.
An opera that integrates the codes and opportunities of augmented reality and amplifies the audience’s sensory experience. Peter Pan is the ideal character to embody the link between the real world and the virtual world and to speak to a broader audience, from traditional opera lovers to digital natives.
The opera will be accompanied by the Cannes PACA Orchestra conducted by Sergio Monterisi and will feature young professional soloists and a choir (the Lost Children) composed of 60 children from the conservatory and two Priority Education Zone schools in Cannes.
Peter Pan has the cultural objective of bringing younger generations closer to opera and its professions (artistic and technical) by immersing them as protagonists in the artistic creation with a professional approach; and the social objective of introducing children, who have more difficulty accessing culture, to the concrete dynamics of live performance, thereby achieving true social diversity.
The Peter Pan opera is based on a model of easily exportable collective collaboration: the main artistic team can move to any city interested in the project, establishing a collaboration with music schools, colleges, youth orchestras, professional orchestras, and technicians to reproduce the performance with local talents and engaging the entire community around Peter Pan. The opera exists in both Italian and French versions.
“I composed music with a timeless language (between cheerful choruses, a tango, a waltz, nods to musical comedy, melancholic arias, references to the romantic repertoire) for a character always elusive and unattainable, a symbol of eternal youth and freedom,” says Sergio Monterisi
