How Do You Stage an Opera for 4 Cars? A Reflection on Mobile Production Hopscotch

Artbound episode Hopscotch: An Opera for the 21st Century explores visionary director Yuval Sharons groundbreaking opera Hopscotch, which unfolded in cars zigzagging throughout Los Angeles, telling a single story of a disappearance across time. Watch the shows debut Tuesday, June 7 at 9 p.m., or check for rebroadcasts here.

It took six composers, six writers, 126 performers, and a team of assistant stage managers, designers, technicians, and drivers to bring mobile opera Hopscotch to life last fall. The ambitious production by The Industry, under the helm of Yuval Sharon, made use of three routes across Los Angeles, each with eight limousines, and required audiences to be more than passive observers.

In a recent interview for our upcoming episode, Sharon emphasized the collaborative nature of Hopscotch, the challenges his team encountered to produce it, and the power of performance to transform.

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Can you break down Hopscotch in just a few sentences?

Hopscotch is an opera that we created with my company called The Industry. It's an opera that took place in 24 cars that drove all around Los Angeles. As a ticket buyer, you got into one car, and you experienced one chapter of a story for 10 minutes. The singers, the musicians, they were driving with you for 10 minutes. You would switch cars and experience another chapter of the story. You'd switch cars again, and switch cars again, and so on, and so on, and so on. And that happened throughout the city over the course of several weekends last fall.

In addition to the distinct routes that Hopscotch took, there was also a central location that we called the Central Hub. And at that Central Hub all the 24 journeys were livestreamed back, so that people could experience for free everything that was happening in the city simultaneously.

Why was Hopscotch staged? What was the point of it all?

What I think is exciting about projects like Hopscotch is the layering effect, of all the different meanings, and all the different possibilities that coexisted with each other, that made up the experience of Hopscotch.

There's part of me that says, Yes, of course the point of it was to notice Los Angeles in a brand new way. That was certainly one of our intentions. We can also say it was our intention to expand the definition of what opera is for contemporary audiences. It's certainly part of the point, too. We can also say the point of it was to push all of us to limits that were beyond the limits that we thought we had. And to see what we could possibly do if we all came together and created this piece. That's certainly one other aspect of it. Or, we could say the point of it was to explore how our inner landscape and the external landscape merge with each other as part of our everyday experience of the city as we drive through it.

I could list probably 10 things that we could say were the reason why we did this project, and that would probably only scratch the surface of the many other possible meanings, or points of view, that each individual audience member really created for themselves.

An aerial view of the Central Hub. Built for Hopscotch, all 24 routes were live streamed and broadcast there simultaneously. | Image: Still from Artbound episode Hopscotch: An Opera for the 21st Century.

Did a particular experience about living in Los Angeles impact the development of the opera?

Yes. I've been a resident of Los Angeles for about five years. It is very infamously called the city without a center. If you look at city plans of traditional European cities, or even a city like New York, you think it kind of grows outward from a particular center. And the relationship of certain institutions, or certain businesses, or certain residences are in a predictable relationship to each other.

Los Angeles doesn't follow any of those rules. It's its own unruly, kind of child of a city. And that for some people can be very frustrating, and very alienating. And I, myself, have also been occasionally frustrated, and alienated, and disoriented by the nature of what Los Angeles is. But, I've also loved and been challenged by the adventure that Los Angeles [is]. The fact that there's no particular center to it, no one center to it, means that life and art exist everywhere, and in a way that is quite wild and quite free.

And in many ways, the very things that we can be most annoyed by living in Los Angeles, namely driving in our own cars, are also potentially the tools of transformation -- self-transformation, and also the transformation of the city. And so, I think that over the course of the five years that I've lived here, I've noticed how I view the city, how I see myself in the city, all through the lens of my windshield, so to speak.

Through driving in Los Angeles, I'm constantly put in this dialogue between my own personal journey and the cityscape around me. And from the very beginning it felt like the breeding ground of a performance. I think at that time I didn't quite know what it would be. But, it just seemed to me, that to really get to the essence of what it means to be part of this particular civic complex of Los Angeles means investigating that.

Image: Still from Artbound episode Hopscotch: An Opera for the 21st Century.

Tell us about that experience of driving through the city, looking through that frame of the windshield of the car. How did those memories influence Hopscotch?

So, if you use a car to get around Los Angeles, and many Angelenos do, you start to experience the city as a kind of rush of sensations. You move through the city in a way that you stop paying attention to the street life. And in many ways, one of the things I wanted to do with Hopscotch was to shift people's attention back to the streets.

And so, often we configured the audience in a situation

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/hopscotch-mobile-opera-the-industr...
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