Orpheus in UNDERWORLD

English Program

About the Performance

Orpheus in UNDERWORLD is a contemporary version of the Orphean myth that fuses opera, dance, extended reality, motion capture and interactive technologies. This world premiere is co-produced by re:Naissance Immersive and contemporary dance company Belle Spirale, and is co-presented as part of CENSORED Opera Festival with Ensemble Nylandia.

Synopsis

UNDERWORLD is a VR ‘game’ — a living archive of diasporic experience that invites players to dissolve the bounds between past and present, self and other, memory and myth. Created by the charismatic Charon, it is a place of expansive possibility.

Our story follows two characters, O and Tim, as they journey through UNDERWORLD in an endeavour to find what they have lost: themselves? each other? a connection to their past? or to their future? 

Through an immersive exploration of our digital and carbon existences, the performance dissolves the binaries we are bound to from birth until death, and strums the threads between heaven and hell, male and female, maker and muse, performer and audience.

The performance runs continuously, approx. 70 min. with no intermission.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. We are supported by the Province of British Columbia. We’re able to continue developing this project with the support from the National Creation Fund from the National Arts Centre.

Meet the Creative Team and Cast

Luke Hathaway is a trans and queer poet, librettist/lyricist, and performer. His books The Affirmations and Years, Months, and Days were named ‘Best Books’ of the year in the Times (London) and the New York Times, respectively. He is a founding member of ANIMA and the Fractal Arts Collective, and a co-creator of numerous works for stage, including the immersive opera Eurydice Fragments (re:naissance opera, 2024) and the chamber operas Do You Hear Me? (Vocalypse, 2026) and Madame Caeneus’s Canteen (ANIMA, 2026). He teaches creative writing and English Literature at Saint Mary’s University in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Canada).

Teiya Kasahara 笠原貞野 (they/he) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans opera, theatre, and contemporary performance for 20 years, and is the creator-performer of the critically acclaimed work The Queen In Me. Teiya is striving to reimagine the operatic canon while investigating the intersectionality of identity politics through works such as The Butterfly Project, Little Mis(s)gender, Eurydice Fragments and Project T: This is My Voice, an iterative and multidisciplinary work documenting their vocal transition on testosterone. They are a co-founder of Amplified Opera, an artistic associate of Confluence Concerts, and a member of Fractal Arts Collective. For more visit www.teiyakasahara.com or follow everywhere @teiyakasahara.

Debi Wong is a fearless and award-winning XR producer, creative director and multidisciplinary artist who has made a significant impact on the contemporary operatic scene and creative technology sector. She is the Founding Artistic Director of re:Naissance Opera in Vancouver, BC and co-executive producer and co-curator of Signals Creative Technology Expo at The Vancouver International Film Festival. Some of her recent accolades include: Executive Producer of Whipped Cream’s music video experience, The Dark (CIMA Bold Award Winner, SXSW Official XR Experience Selection); Co-creator and Executive Producer of Live From The Underworld (Aurea XR Award, double winner in creativity and innovation), and she recently opened TED 2023 conference singing as The Solar Ambassador in K Allado McDowell’s new AI opera, Song Of The Ambassadors. Wong was recently named one of the world’s 100 most influential experiential designers by XP Land’s XLIST.

Roark has been a resident artist at the Banff Centre, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Sound Symposium, Avaloch Farm, the Erasmus Foundation, and the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, where he was co-recipient of the Tournon Branley Prize for collaborative work in architecture and music. He has studied at the Konservatorium Winterthur in Switzerland, and he holds degrees from Oberlin College and Conservatory and the University of British Columbia, where he received his Doctor of Musical Arts. Roark has served as President of Vancouver Pro Musica and Associate Artistic Director of Redshift Music in Vancouver, BC, where he also taught theory and composition from 2015-2019 at the Vancouver Academy of Music. He is currently Co-Artistic Director of Arkora Music and makes his home in Toronto, ON.

Brian Topp is Vancouver, BC based composer, XR artist, and interactive audio designer. He is also the co-founder of Chroma Mixed Media, a digital arts collective that focuses on collaborative interactive works that span many artistic disciplines.

“A dance artist, creator, and producer, I have danced with Ballet BC for 14 years and subsequently have been a guest artist and Artist in Residence. Now independent, I hold the position of Artist in Residence at Vancouver’s Chutzpah! Festival and am a Creative Hub member at Presentation House Theatre. My creations have been supported by Dance Victoria, Ballet BC, Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, Presentation House Theatre, New Works, Vernon Performing Arts Centre, The Gordon Smith Foundation, Dancing on the Edge, InFrinGing Festival, and Shadbolt Centre. As a freelancer, I am currently dancing with Re:Naissance Opera, zoe | juniper, and Wen Wei Dance.”

Neelesh Nair is a technical artist and director specializing in motion capture. He has worked at the cutting edge of several industries including video games, VFX, virtual production, VR, AR, live XR productions, and medical technology. Using technologies like Unreal Engine, projection mapping, LED volumes and motion capture he crafts virtual worlds and immersive experiences. He is always striving to push the boundaries of digital and live production.

African-American bass-baritone Brandon Thornhill is a well-rounded and diverse musician, performer and professional voice actor. He performed the roles of the Sergeant in Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Flora’s servant in La Traviata with Vancouver Opera. He has also performed principal roles in Burnaby Lyric Opera’s productions of La Bohème and Il Barbiere di Siviglia. He performed the role of Coalhouse Walker Jr. in Fighting Chance Production’s concert production of the musical Ragtime. Brandon co-created/produced Ebony Roots with Sound The Alarm Music Theatre which is a project that celebrates black musicians and the history of African American/Canadian music. Brandon has voiced ads for MLB, the Toronto Raptors, Google and DoorDash among others. He received his Master’s degree in opera at the University of British Columbia and his Bachelor’s degree in music at the University of North Florida. In addition to his voice over work, Brandon performs at retirement residences across the Lower Mainland.

Leo D.E. Johnson is a trans, Black, Scotian artist whose music presents a transcendent blend of Spiritual Soul and Galactic Gospel, infused with gritty West Coast Grunge. Futuristic by design, his sound lifts listeners to higher realms, igniting the spirit with infectious energy. Drawing on diverse experiences and cultural influences, Leo infuses his music with a unique blend of soulful storytelling and powerful messages of resilience, joy, and hope. Now residing in the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, he is dedicated to honoring and amplifying Indigenous, Black, and Queer voices while advocating forsocial justice and equality. Leo’s music channels themes of self-discovery and identity. His magnetic stage presence and unapologetic authenticity serve as a guiding light for meaningful change, uniting listeners through a transformative musical journey that radiates LOVE. Join him in reflection and celebration of the power of music!

Brenna Metzmeier is a multidisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, BC, originally from Terrace, BC. She trained at the Victoria Academy of Ballet, earning her diploma in classical ballet 2016. Brenna’s artistic collaborations include; Ballet Etoile, Sawdust Collective, Pi Theatre, The Banff Dance Company, Inverso Productions, Vision Impure, Opera Box, State of Underdress, Little Chamber Music, Northwest Dance Project, Corporeal Imago, Wen Wei Dance, Edmonton Opera/Nicole Von Arcs, Action at a Distance, and Belle Spirale. She is also a founding member of CAMP, recognized for its selection in multiple festivals, residencies and choreographic commissions. Brenna also creates her own work and has performed excerpts of her solo work at The Irish Aerial Creation Centre, The Dance Centre’s 12 Minute Max, and Belles Spirale’s The Dance Deck. Most recently, Brenna continued her collaborations with Belle Spirale Dance Projects in their double bill UNIVERSUS; performing in Dance Victoria’s season in January 2026. Followed by IMAGO, a duet created with Corporeal Imago for the Adelaide Fringe Festival 2026.

Nathan Coburn is a freelance creator, and performer based in Vancouver, BC. As a performer they have worked with and performed works by Alexis Fletcher, Sylvain Senez, Fernando Hernando Magadan, Cristina Bucci, Shay Kuebler, Shahar Binyamini, and Jera Wolfe. Since 2023 Nathan has been co-artistic director of Paper Rabbits alongside Elle Derkitt and Sophia Makarenko. Spanning live performance and works for film, their co-creations and independent work have been presented by Belle Spirale’s Dance Deck, Kokoro Dance, Kits Neighbourhood House/The Vancouver Foundation, and Vines Arts Festival. Nathan Coburn is an alumni of Arts Umbrella Dance’s Graduate Program, and a former dancer with the Ballet BC Annex.

Keagan is a Studio 58 Graduate. Living with a love of and passion for lighting. As a Gender-Fluid, Non-Binary, Autistic designer they love working with the masculine, feminine and other aspects of themselves to add to the creative and collaborative process. As a designer they paint the performers and their environments with light, working to build an atmosphere that pulls the audience in. Recent design credits include: Midsummer Night’s Dream (Trinity Western), Kill the Ripper (Geekenders & Affair of Honor), Circus Gala (Circus3), Crisis on Planet Z ( Monster Theatre), Six of One (Studio 58), Neverland Night Circus (Geekenders), Trans Scripts (Zee Zee & Frank Theatre), Alice in Glitterland (Geekenders), Four Play (Studio 58), and Alma (East Van Opera). They love playing with the emotions of lights, and how lighting effects the tone and reality of what is being poured on stage. Playing with the psychology of lighting and colour theory.

Van Lefan (樂凡) is a Taiwanese interdisciplinary artist currently based in Vancouver, BC, working between sound, dance, Northern Shaolin kung fu, theatre, and visual arts. With her voice, guitar, flute, and live electronics, she moves between folk, pop, and experimental sound, writing songs that are inquiries into both personal and collective experiences. Her works serve as spaces to process, grieve, resist despair through hope, explore possibilities, and discover new ways to co-create a world of our imaginations. Her album “What Holds Us Together?” is a sonic journey synergizing folk, pop, experimental soundscapes and poetry, weaving a tapestry of ancestry, identity, ecological reverence and social justice. Her second album “Unsent Letters: To Whom It May Concern” was released in March 2025. Lefan has performed at TaiwanFest, Jade Music Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Vines Arts Festival, and across Taiwan. She also works as a theatre sound designer, and 4DSOUND technician at Lobe Spatial Sound Studio.

Maria Zarrillo is a queer, non-binary, Vancouver-based Arts Manager with a background in producing, stage management, mentorship, advocacy, and research. They have worked with a variety of companies and communities in these capacities both locally and nationally. In addition to their freelance career, Maria was the Managing Producer at the frank theatre and is currently the Interim Managing Director with Rumble. Maria is a graduate of Studio 58’s production program, the University of Winnipeg with a major in Theatre & Film and a minor in Human Rights, and they are wrapping up a Master of Arts in Justice Studies at Royal Roads University.

Anna (she/her) is a stage manager and administrator currently working and living on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaɬ Nations. Anna’s recent credits include ‘Lumbar 5, Thoracic 12’ (rEvolver Festival), ‘Sunrise Betties’ (ITSAZOO Productions), ‘The Narrow Bridge’ (Pomerantz Collective), ‘Peace Country’ (RIce&Beans Theatre), Symbiotic, Harvest Moon & Cardinal Point Cabarets (Rumble Theatre), Tremors Festival (Rumble Theatre), ‘Angels Bone’ (Sound The Alarm), Vancouver Fringe and Bard on The Beach. Anna began her career in the UK as an audio technician on the multiple award winning musical ‘TImpson: The Musical!’ (Gigglemug Theatre) at Edinburgh Fringe.

Jess Vaira is a singer, songwriter, seamstress impassioned by harmony and sustainability.  Jazzy, Singer/Songwriter, Soul with harmonies galore and an unusual approach to using a loop pedal thrown in for good measure.

Jess has played alongside such acts as the Sam Roberts Band and Sweatshop Union at The Edge of The World Festival in Haida Gwaii.  Several of her songs have been featured in Film, Theatre and Television including the series Cedar Cove on the Hallmark Network.

Well-versed in a variety of musical styles, Jen Lewin is a Vancouver-based keyboard player and singer who began her professional career in 2001. A thoughtful, intuitive musician, Jen’s superpower lies in her ability to connect with the folks onstage and off, bringing a sense of camaraderie, playfulness, and joy to every performance no matter the genre or venue. Besides her solo/duo/trio work as a frontperson, you may have heard Jen playing keyboards with the fabulous Nearly Neil and the Solitary Band or with her 8-piece all-star passion project Deep Cutzzz, among others.

Scene-by-Scene Synopsis

Orpheus in UNDERWORLD | Scene-by-Scene Synopsis

Sc. 1: BABY SHOWER | O & TIM’S APARTMENT

Open on two characters in shock: O & Tim have just endured a baby shower, which they agreed to host in order to humour Tim’s mother. They are drowning in blue, boy-coded gifts. O feels overwhelmed by this explosion of the gender-binary in their home.

Tim tries to cheer O up, but O won’t be cajoled; they suggest instead a journey into a virtual-reality game, ‘Underworld,’ where they have been making something for Tim to see. Tim reluctantly agrees.

Sc. 2: THE RIVER INTO UNDERWORLD | THE VR GAME ‘UNDERWORLD’ 

The virtual world of UNDERWORLD takes shape around them: glimmering avatars animated by real people on the platform, including the charismatic ‘Charon’, creator of the game.

UNDERWORLD is a world-building, social Virtual Reality game and Charon explains: you can ‘build’ your memories as worlds within the game, ‘play’ them, or share them with others. You can reimagine real life. Having given Tim and O a basic orientation, Charon sends them off into the game.

Sc. 3: OH, YOU BEAUTIFUL SOULS | THE POOL OF MNEMOSYNE

O invites Tim to visit their ‘Memory Bank’, the storehouse of memories they’ve built on the platform. O wants to bring Tim back to an early moment in their relationship, a university acting class in which a teacher invited them into a gender-expanding exploration, using the archetypal characters of Orpheus and Eurydice.

O and Tim don the ‘Orpheus’ and ‘Eurydice’ avatars respectively, and enter the memory.

Sc. 4: ACTING CLASS / ORPHEUS & EURYDICE | THE RIVER LETHE

The memory comes to life around us. O and Tim ‘play’ themselves; the Teacher appears as an NPC (a non-player character) — O’s re-creation. Together, O and Tim enact an iconic scene where Orpheus attempts to rescue his beloved, Eurydice, from the Underworld, on the condition that he doesn’t look behind him as he leads her out; in a moment of doubt — or passion — he turns around, and loses her forever.

As the acting class unfolds, O is serious, Tim clownish; O turns around in annoyance, and the exercise falls apart. O speaks of the sense of having briefly found – then lost – themselves in the context of the exercise; Tim finds himself moved. The two find their way back into the scene, now both playing it seriously.

Sc. 5: DRAGON GODS | THE RIVER PHLEGETHON

We are back in O’s ‘Memory Bank’. Tim asks to see more. O offers to show him the first memory that they made, one that goes back to childhood.

Donning ‘witness’ avatars, O and Tim see NPC’s in the shapes of dragons enact a scene between young O and their Mah-Mah, their grandmother. Beguiled by young O’s identification with Super Mario and his dragon-friend, Yoshi, Mah-Mah tells O about the powerful and shapeshifting dragons in her Chinese tradition. Mah-Mah affirms O’s feeling of identity: ‘Yes! You are 大膽龍 –  bold dragon!’

Sc. 6: DOCTORS / MAGNIFICAT | THE RIVER ACHERON

In the final memory O has prepared, O and Tim play as themselves again, and a dysphoric hospital scenario takes shape where clownish doctors announce to them that their in-utero child has an intersex identity, but the language is pathologizing and reductive.

O breaks out of the scene, frustrated: Tim has repeated what happened in real life, rather than taking the opportunity to disrupt the memory. Another queer parent enters and announces that their surrogate is pregnant, and bursts into the Virgin Mary’s song of praise, seeing themselves in that archetypal mother. O begins to picture what parenting could be like for themself outside of gender binaries. Tim still struggles to understand. 

An escalating argument between O and Tim eventually triggers an override in the game: the wailing river of Cocytus calls them to face the source of their troubles. Tim jumps into an uncompleted memory of O’s. O follows, unsure of what they’ll see.

Sc. 7: THE NIGHT BEFORE | THE RIVER COCYTUS

It’s the night before their wedding and O is experiencing cold feet about the femme-coded dress they’ve acquired. They refuse to wear it. ‘Fine then,’ says Tim, ‘I’ll wear the dress.’ They swap clothes, and O feels affirmed.

Sc. 8: THE DAY OF THE WEDDING

Now it is the day of the wedding. We learn that O didn’t wear the suit, and Tim didn’t wear the dress. Whelmed by dysphoria, O — in the terrible dress — walks down the aisle; when Tim turns around to look at them, he sees the radiant bride of his imagination, not the nonbinary person who is dying right before his eyes.

Sc. 9: RENDETEMI IL MIO BEN

We are back with O and Tim in the present-time of UNDERWORLD. Drawing on the language of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, O demands of Tim an acknowledgment of their whole self: Rendetemi il mio ben! Give me back what is mine!  

Sc. 10:  CHARON RETURNS

Overwhelmed, Tim begs to return to ‘real life’, but O has done all they can and turns away. Panicking, Tim lashes out at the game and Charon appears. Reading Tim’s distress, Charon invites Tim to create a memory of his own.

Sc. 11:  TRANSCESTORS

Tim doesn’t know much about his family, but tries to describe an old photograph to Charon, and a memory takes shape: ‘a woman wearing a man’s hat’, the other as a man in femme-coded clothes. As the memory animates, however, Tim sees that the second figure is comfortable in these clothes; they are her own. The second figure is not, as Tim had thought, his grandfather, but his other grandmother. They are his trans-cestors, Charon explains.

Sc. 12:  DO OVER | THE RIVER STYX

Tim shows O a new avatar he has made, in the figure of his trans grandmother Delilah. As he recognizes the expansiveness in his own family tree, his own experience of gender, he’s able to see it in O. He asks O for a redo — a chance to start again, as they really are; O is compelled to propose again.

The world of UNDERWORLD swells up around them, affirming this new memory. When it finally dissolves, we are back with O and Tim in their apartment, as they begin their lives with a renewed commitment to each other and their expected child. 

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