An immersive exhibition is usually designed for a place with no history: an empty box, white walls, geometry decided at the drawing board. An opera house is the exact opposite. It has boxes, stuccoes, curves, a raked floor, and two hundred years of decoration that cannot be covered up.
Teatro Ristori asked us to bring an immersive experience into that hall without it ceasing to be a theater. It was the first immersive show inside an opera house, and there was no proven way to do it.
We handled the work's executive production: supervising materials and coordinating with the multimedia designer and the theater's technical crew. The show is signed by Massimiliano Siccardi and Luca Longobardi, who also composed the original music, with choreography by Alessandra Celentano and art direction by Valerio Antonio Ciminelli.
The central problem was geometry. The narratives of Klimt and Shakespeare had to wrap around the hall: the theater was fully fitted with circular tulle screens for 360-degree projection, and every piece of content was built to measure for that enveloping surface.
The second constraint was respect for the hall. In a historic theater you work with installation restrictions, limited anchor points, safety routes, and setup windows squeezed between one program and the next.
The first immersive show ever staged inside an Italian opera house.
