The Tête à Tête festival is now in its seventeenth year, offering a wide programme of short operas each year both live and in digital format.
#CAPITAL is an example of what can be achieved when music, technology, and in this case, fashion, come together to create a production.
Alastair White’s sixth fashion-opera premiered at Metaverse Fashion Week 2023, and is performed within a virtual, bespoke, opera house designed by Sybarite architects inside Metaverse Labs’ platform Dragon City.
It showcases the digital fashion of Winter Olympics brand CHENPENG curated by Gemma A Williams, the fashion week’s ambassador.
It is performed by soprano Kelly Poukens and danced by Zara Sands, with sound production by Pieter Franssen and videography by Hannah Lovell. The libretto can be downloaded and studied before watching the performance, or referred to during it.
As the fashion items are revealed, screens allow some interaction with the real world, while live chat and movement allow the 3-D space to be fully explored.
White’s libretto is deeply symbolic, focusing on materialism, tokenism, and whatever is possible. In seguing from cheeseburgers to shells, it doesn’t always make sense or work as a whole, and I found that at many points the words and visuals did not quite gel together.
This is a futuristic fashion opera; White’s sixth in collaboration with fashion houses. It plays with the idea that the metaverse can include anything you want it to be, and it suggests that the real and the virtual can co-exist together and always have.
Perhaps not as accessible or easily understandable as the composer’s earlier Robe, #CAPITAL does intrigue with its deconstruction of capitalism and purchasing power.
Poukens makes the most of the very high range of much of the piece, soaring into an other-worldly exploration of the score. In the meantime figures dressed in ever more-outlandish costumes circulate in the opera space.
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#CAPITAL streamed as part of 2024’s Tête à Tête festival. For more on the work of Gemma A Williams, visit https://www.fashion-narratives.com/; for more on Alastair White, visit https://www.alastairwhite.org/.