Debi Wong, Jan 28, 2026.
Opera has always been immersive—we’re revitalizing its role as a hub for visionary ideas, collaboration, and awe.
A Legacy Art Form
Whenever I bring up the word opera, people immediately have an idea of what it looks, sounds, and feels like— maybe it’s the red velvet curtains and looming proscenium stage, or it’s the high-voiced singer in a horned helmet shattering glass. Sometimes it’s Bugs Bunny in drag being wooed by a bamboozled Elmer Fudd; maybe it’s just your grandparent napping amongst a stuffy audience garbed in tuxedos and gowns.
The point being: opera has a reputation for being a legacy artform – something elitist and out of touch.
Contrary to opera’s legacy status, the Immersive Entertainment industry has been expanding wildly over the past 8 years. The global immersive entertainment market was valued at $61.8 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach $252.9 billion by 2028, a sharp contrast to opera attendance which has declined steadily, with the largest companies reporting a 24.7% decrease in the 2022-2023 season. I find these statistics fascinating because as vocabulary like “immersive experiences,” “mixed-reality” and “extended reality (XR)” become commonplace, I can’t help but wonder why Opera – an OG multimedia spectacle – is being left behind. Opera was blending music, theatre, visual art, dance, engineering and technology into complete sensory experiences centuries before Silicon Valley made immersion a buzzword.
The OG Immersive Form
Opera’s immersive origins trace back to 16th century Italian salon culture – spaces where philosophers, scientists, artists, and visionaries would gather to prototype epic new ways of telling stories. These weren’t just social events. They were creative incubators where thinkers from different disciplines could challenge and push each other to reimagine artistic possibilities.
This creative renaissance aligned perfectly with a revolution happening at the same time in theatrical design. Some of the most groundbreaking innovations at the time were inspired by naval engineering techniques. Giacomo Torelli, who was best known for developing the chariot-and-pole system, used the mechanics of pulleys and counterweights used in ship rigging to present seamless and rapid scene changes on stage. This new system enabled elaborate Baroque theatre productions to transition between scenes, transforming performance spaces into portals to other worlds. When combined with music’s emotional resonance, these technical innovations opened up entirely new storytelling possibilities in the 17th century.
Today’s booming immersive entertainment industry feels like something of sci-fi futures: it’s exciting, cutting-edge, new. But every time I encounter sketches of 17th century opera sets – with their elaborate moving scenery and ingenious practical effects – I think back to those salon gatherings where artists and intellectuals dared to dream up these multimedia experiences.
A Blueprint for innovation
I started re:Naissance Opera because I felt like I couldn’t find the right platform to explore and express my creative instincts. Throughout my formal education, opera and classical music were presented to me in lineages of musical works; or rather, masterpieces that were created by a highly curated list of composers. Studying the history of opera solely through the lens of the musical scores and their composers seemed excruciatingly bizarre to me; opera was a multidisciplinary artform that reportedly had the power to rile audiences into frenzies. If this was the case, why were we studying the art form as the legacy of specific composers? Why weren’t we studying the design process— from initial salon gatherings, to set design, to audience feedback? This topic will have to wait for another article (or perhaps a salon discussion?), but what I saw and continue to look back on, is a blueprint for radical collaboration and innovation, and genre-defying storytelling.
Tradition and Technology
At re:Naissance Opera, we put this blueprint into practice by bringing together game designers, software engineers, motion capture experts, dancers, and classical musicians to reimagine what opera could look and feel like if it were invented today. This journey through historic traditions and emerging technologies led us to create works like OrpheusVR, a prototype for the first interactive opera video-game in virtual reality, Live From The Underworld— the award-winning live performance that uses real time motion capture to bring avatars to life on stage, and Eurydice Fragments, our new immersive touring production that blends digital and physical worlds.
What I found fascinating about this unique team of developers, artists, engineers and designers was how naturally the spirit of those 16th century salons emerged in our creative process. I didn’t have to give any speeches or context for the need to innovate or the desire to push creativity beyond prescribed boundaries— it happened organically because each collaborator brought their own toolset and creative instincts to the table. Our dancers understood movement and gesture in ways that revolutionized how we approached motion capture. Game developers saw musical scores and operatic stories as interactive systems waiting to be exposed. Today, we continue to work in this way, like those 16th century salons, knowing that innovation will naturally emerge from the collision of different disciplines and perspectives.
That’s Not Opera
One of my favourite comments we receive (more often than you would think) from audiences is: “that’s not opera!”. Sometimes it is meant as a compliment and sometimes it’s in the context of grumbling about ruining a legacy artform. Either way, I see this as a benchmark for success. It was never the intention to create performance that can be easily compared to existing forms, be it opera or video games. We want the echoes of our disciplines to be felt, but our goal at re:Naissance is was always to push boundaries of genre and imagination so we can could offer our audiences entirely new and awe-inspiring experiences. Had our collective understanding of the operatic tradition stayed rooted in its history of cross-disciplinary collaboration and its history of bold and edgy innovation, we would probably be experiencing a different artform— or at the very least a broader understanding of what is considered “operatic”.
Immersive Worlds With Boundless Storytelling
Opera was never just about music, or theatre, or spectacle— it was about creating entire worlds where every artistic discipline could transcend its individual boundaries. When we embrace this expansive definition, “opera” becomes less about a specific sound or style, and more about the audacious act of world-building. It’s about creating spaces where dancers can embody digital avatars, where engineers can compose with movement, where classical musicians can play inside virtual landscapes. At re:Naissance, it is also about creating processes where bold and diverse artists can show up as their whole selves, and joyfully execute their creativity and artistic visions. These are the new operatic worlds— where technology and tradition collide to create experiences that defy genre and unleash boundless creative possibilities. ■
Written by Debi Wong, Founding Artistic Director.