Michel van der Aa’s Sunken Garden takes opera to a new level Thursday 11 Apr 2013, by Warwick Thompson Kate Miller-Heidke and Jonathan McGovern in Sunken Garden, co-written by Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell (Picture: ENO/Joost Rietdijk) When it was announced that the English National Opera was to produce a work at the Barbican in 3D, the obvious question was: isn’t live opera already in 3D? Don’t all performers occupy three dimensions on stage? (Some, ahem, more than others?) They do, of course, but the innovation is that now they will interact with pre-filmed 3D singers and 3D computer effects. Welcome to the Sunken Garden, a place where vertical and horizontal light polarisation (that’s 3D to you and me) is about to take opera to a new level of experimentation. The man behind it all is Dutch composer and director Michel van der Aa. Sunken Garden – with a libretto by Cloud Atlas novelist David Mitchell – is his most ambitious project to date. It’s about a documentary film-maker (Roderick Williams) investigating the disappearance of a software engineer and a young socialite. The film-maker enters an occult garden and finds his subjects trapped by a glamorous vampire in a strange state of limbo. ‘The garden is a space between life and death, day and night, heaven and Earth,’ says the composer. ‘And when we considered how best to present this space, that’s where the idea for 3D originated. ‘It’s not just eye candy but a vital tool for the narrative. It sits in the very DNA of the storytelling. We learn something about the missing people in the beginning from their friends and neighbours. And then, in the garden, we meet them and hear what happened in their own words. It’s a new dimension to their stories.’ Righty-ho. But will we have to wear those funny glasses? ‘Yes, and I think it’s going to be obvious when you have to put them on,’ says van der Aa. ‘It’s when the main character enters the garden.’ He looks rather woebegone. ‘But I expect there’ll be ten people every night who miss the cue and wonder why the stage suddenly looks so blurry.’ How did his relationship with Mitchell begin? ‘I loved Cloud Atlas and felt David had a gift for the building blocks of a story and for the poetics: for both the skeleton and the meat, if you like,’ he says. ‘So I emailed his agent and we met.’ Did he request anything specific of Mitchell? ‘No. We started with a blank page and talked a lot about opera. We didn’t want to make an epic piece about gods and heroes but something about real people to whom contemporary audiences could relate.’ But modern audiences are able to relate to, say, Wagner’s gods and demigods, aren’t they? Isn’t there a danger that the more specific a story, the less it will attract people into the mysterious realm of operatic truth? ‘Of course,’ says van der Aa. ‘But we wanted to define for ourselves what we want to see and hear, rather than have too much of the traditional residue of opera determining what it should be. And because part of the work is filmed, I had to avoid traditional operatic acting. I needed a more filmic and realistic style, or the live and filmed elements wouldn’t match.’ What will the music be like? ‘It’s my most colourful score till now,’ says van der Aa. ‘On one side, there are some really abstract sounds and at the other there are pop songs and dance beats. There are real arias, too.’ So there are some traditional elements? ‘For me, it’s all about finding the balance to get the message across, between form and concept, poetry and directness,’ says van der Aa. ‘Too far either way and it’s not interesting.’ .