Orfeo ed Eurydice: XR opera experience
“Orfeo ed Eurydice” is the unique mixed reality opera experience our team developed in 2020 for the Robert L.B. Tobin Director-Designer Prize competition. I was proud to work with creative technologist Gil Sperling to prepare the conceptual and technical breakdown of the XR system.
Our production concept also includes a story breakdown by director and writer Pete Danelski, costumes sketches and collages by costume designer Allegra Deneroff, VR mockups, and stage renderings by visual artist Aoshuang Zhang.
Orpheus and Eurydice: our interpretation and my reflections on the myth
The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is so universal and open-ended that it can be interpreted in thousands of ways.
The interpretation proposed by Pete Danelski and supported by our team implies that Orpheus and Eurydice are essentially one and the same, their reunion means reuniting genderless Orpheus with his own soul.
I like this interpretation, but in the original myth (not in the opera by C.W. Gluck that we were designing for) Orpheus and Eurydice lose each other forever after he turns back.
When we started working on the project, I couldn’t stop asking myself: why did Orpheus look back? The explanation that he stopped hearing her footsteps and got worried, reminds me of the infamous explanation why Rose in “Titanic” pushed Jack from the wooden door in the final scene: “he was already dead, you know.”
That’s not how it works with people deeply in love. If Hades tells you, “don’t look back,” you don’t look back until you pull your loved one out. You don’t push them into dark waters. You grit your teeth and keep holding, pulling, going.
Unless your loved one doesn’t want to be pulled out.
This idea kept flashing in the back of my unconsciousness: what if Eurydice didn’t want to come back? What if she specifically tempted Orpheus to look at her? Slowing down the step, starting crying and calling him, asking to look back to prove that he really remembers and loves her (such nonsense: he has traveled down to the Underworld to rescue her already!).
What is the Kingdom of the Dead, the Underworld, the mystic unity of space and time from where no body and no soul returns? I heard once that people don’t come back from places they feel really good in. They don’t come back because they don’t want to not because they can’t.
The Kingdom of the Dead, the Realm of Ghosts, the Home of Shadows — this might also be the Past. A Human, a Poet, an Artist, Orpheus — you name it, is just not supposed to peer into the Past. As mortals we can remember past, we can thank it, we can even hate it but trying to grasp it desperately and to pull it back means betraying yourself, always.
Having returned to Earth after his failure, Orpheus remembered Eurydice until his last day and blessed the world with many beautiful sad songs. Would he have sung them had he returned with a Euridice — a half-living creature that had already seen and understood something inaccessible to mortals, but so important and so valuable, maybe even more important than love itself.
Something like true freedom, perhaps?
Orpheus can be seen as the poet, that wakes up in every lover, always bleeding, losing, suffering, dying, rising from the dead, admitting pain, and dying again. Almost nothing depends on Orpheus, just as from any person in love, except for his songs.
Eurydice may be seen as love itself, that used to be so vivid and alive and suddenly turned into a disembodied smoky shadow. And if Orpheus, instead of keeping the memory of the days when love was truly alive, stubbornly peers into the shadows, the shadow will turn into the abyss, and we all know what happens next. If love is immortal, or the memory of love is immortal and it remained untouched in Eurydice — it’s probably not something she would wish for the man she loved.
So yes, I don’t think Eurydice wanted to come back.
P.S. And Jack from Titanic was a guest from the future or an alien, so Rose just had to do this to him.
