Hello. I'm James Bingham. I'm a white male. I’ve got brown, curly hair.
I'm wearing a dark red jumper and I’m wearing glasses.
I work for Irish National Opera. I’m their Studio and Outreach Producer
and as part of Traction, I will be the Producer in the Irish trial.
Well, Irish National Opera as a company is actually only two years old,
but in that time we've run a number of projects
that incorporate into them aspects of co-creation.
One example was a project called Popera.
Popera saw us work with Music Generation Carlow and the Royal Irish Academy of Music.
In this project, we worked with four primary schools and the composer
Andrew Synott alongside a broader artistic team to create four operas.
Now these four operas were composed by the children in partnership with Andrew
and the children also performed as singers and instrumentalists
in the pieces together in one performance.
It was a huge success and it was a real example of letting the children lead
in that composition process and seeing something really interesting created through that process.
Through the trial in Ireland with Irish National Opera for Traction,
we're going to be working with three different communities.
One is the residents of the island of Inis Meáin, which is part of the Aran Islands.
We're going to be working in Tullamore, which is in the Midlands of Ireland,
with secondary school students there and we're also going to be working in Tallaght
which is a district just near Dublin, with residents living there.
With these three communities it's not entirely clear next year
how exactly our engagement will manifest itself.
That's because this year, we're going to spend the time working and listening to communities
to see what kinds of engagement will be of benefit and will be of interest to them
in terms of opera co-creation.
So this year we're running a series of workshops
in each of these three communities and in each community,
we're focusing on a different aspect of creation in Opera
because it's such an inherently multidisciplinary art form.
In Tallaght, we're going to be looking at co-creation in a visual aspect,
so how design can be created through digital technology and through virtual reality.
We're going to be looking at co-creation of music in Tullamore;
and then in Inis Meáin, we're looking at how we can create together a story in those kinds of ways.
Now, based on the information that we learn over the course of this first year,
as well as the exploration and understanding that we get through virtual reality technology,
we're going to then build projects next year that really suit these three communities
and are projects that are going to be of interest to these communities.
The idea being that by the end of that project, each of these three communities
will have generated material that will be of use to our creative team
to shape and create a cohesive whole work that can exist in the virtual reality format.
The final piece itself is going to be presented in 2022.
First, it will be shown to all three communities in special events
and then we're going to tour it round to as many places in the country as possible.
The really great thing about a virtual reality opera is,
because it all exists on a virtual reality headset,
you can really take it to any kind of public space.
For more information on this project, if you're curious to learn more,
please head to irishnationalopera.ie. Thank you very much.