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Visual worlds

Working alongside the conductor, director and the rest of the creative team, the opera designer creates the space in which the opera will be ‘set’. Designers are sometimes responsible for both set and costume design, allowing one seamless vision linking performance to setting. Their choices are dictated by aesthetics but also key in conveying the cultural, political and social universe of the production, linking it with the wider world.

Opera stages are so intensely mechanical that designers can also use them to do things that would not be possible in a conventional space. Floors can move, projections can disorient or obscure, and platforms can be stacked, rearranged or replaced with walls of flowers. See where OperaVision’s collection of different visual worlds takes you.