By Carol Badaracco Padgett
Tomer Zvulun surveyed a stage sparkling in the distance, where the opera singers stood. And he thought, “We can break this barrier.”
The barrier he speaks of: an orchestra pit-sized expanse that divides the audience from the performance onstage.
As general and artistic director for The Atlanta Opera, Zvulun has found a creative ally and like-minded visionary in cinematographer Felipe Barral, director of The Atlanta Opera Film Studio. Since the pandemic the two have worked side-by-side to bring opera up close to a wider audience by capturing, producing, and streaming the company’s performances — putting all eyes on Atlanta arts in the process.
During quarantine in 2020 and 2021, Zvulun and the Atlanta Opera received guidance from Atlanta health authorities on how to safely hold live performances outdoors under a circus tent. This move made the Atlanta Opera the only opera company in the world to hold a wealth of live performances during that precarious time in history (eighteen performances of “Pagliacci” and “The Kaiser of Atlantis” in the fall of 2020, plus two concerts; then in the spring 15 performances of “The Threepenny Opera” and “Carmen,” along with three concerts). And as Barral’s camera captured the live performances, the Atlanta Opera Film Studio streamed them to relatively homebound viewers all around the world.
Once the pandemic was declared under control by health authorities, including the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the cloistered artform of opera had reached viewers around the globe — both seasoned opera-goers and newbies alike.
Next, Atlanta’s forward-looking opera company stood poised to break through even more barriers.
“In theatre there had always been this pristine environment with an orchestra between you and the performers,” Zvulun says of the centuries-old status quo where patrons in fancy dresses and tuxedos physically sat and gazed far forward – sometimes squinting through binocular opera glasses.
“But now when people come to our performances [of “La Bohème”], there’s no orchestra pit between them and the performers. There’s something primal and unexpected about that,” Zvulun notes.
The Bohème Project
In the Atlanta Opera’s fall 2024 production, The Bohème Project (Sept. 18 – Oct. 6, 2024), Zvulun and Barral broke through another wall by putting opera and musical theatre in-the-round before a live audience in an immersive, multimedia-rich experience. One where the orchestra pit was tucked out of the way, largely heard and seen only minimally.
For the project, Zvulun and Barral teamed up with renowned designer and visual artist Vita Tzykun, who worked alongside Zvulun as co-director. Together, the creative partners staged performances of dual works centered around the theme of young adults finding their way during pandemic-times — namely Giacomo Puccini’s “La Bohème” opera and playwright Jonathan David Larson’s musical, “Rent.”
“We are performing in-the-round and in a ring,” Tzykun described. “So the audience is both inside the performance area and outside. And all the performers are in the ring inside the audience. That’s as immersive as it really gets.”
And further still, they created a barrier-breaking mind-shift.
While in the original libretto for “La Bohème” the backdrop was the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1830s, before the tuberculosis vaccine, Zvulun and Tzykun time-shifted the story forward to the current century’s coronavirus pandemic, with a setting in New York City. “Rent’s” setting was already the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s in New York City’s East Village. So the staging concepted by Tzykun and Zvulun was essentially the same for both performances, with different props and scenery.
Equally a giant shift, the ambitious performances weren’t held at a traditional theatre venue — with an orchestra pit essentially pushing back the audience from the performance. But instead, staging was constructed from scratch at Pullman Yards in Atlanta’s Kirkwood neighborhood, a one-time sleeper train car manufacturing and repair facility for Pullman Co.
Then the Atlanta Opera added another creative twist: bringing the two productions together and allowing them to work in juxtaposition due to “La Bohème’s” new reflection of the globe’s most recent contagion, Covid-19.
In this fresh setting, barriers between audience and art came down even more — with the orchestra positioned behind the main action in “La Bohème” and on the second floor of a constructed two-story artist’s loft in “Rent.”
“There’s something very poetic about industrial decay,” Zvulun said of the setting he and the team created for the joint performance. “Both productions are about this urban decay, so [Pullman Yards] worked.”
Tzykun added, “Our intent with the immersive double billing was to break down the fourth wall — the barrier between audience and performers. And to bring the audience as close as possible to our wonderful cast. This was [something the audience had]never experienced before and maybe never will again.”
As an aside, even the area leading into the performance space at Pullman Yards was alive with Tzykun’s vision. As she said, “I chose local graffiti artists to do my set.” She also kept many of these artists onboard after the performances began — where they could be viewed creating their works in the walkways leading into and out of the stage area from the lobby.
“Artists create vibrant spaces wherever they go … exploding with creativity and joy,” Tzykun mused about the arrangement with her artists.
Tzykun then noted a seismic shout-out to Zvulun for rallying the troops to create a theatrical space from nothing but the raw warehouse of Pullman Yards, which required a huge team and laborious months of planning and installation.
“Most opera and theatre companies won’t take on something like this,” she added of the live performances at Pullman Yards.
Film meets an in-the-round, live performance environment
Cinematographer Barral found it invigorating to capture the performances at Pullman Yards.
“From the beginning with Tomer, we’ve been changing the culture — and I’ve been standing up on-stage with the camera … to [allow]the audience to experience the show in a unique way.”
For The Bohème Project, Barral’s film was used for streaming on the Atlanta Opera’s channel, stream.atlantaopera.org, bringing the performances into viewers’ homes and lives. And it was also simulcast to Atlanta’s 55-year-old art house, the Tara Theatre, to an audience that wanted to view the performances in that manner.
Alongside Barral’s work, Tzykun created The Bohème Project’s projections, which were displayed on large screens on all four sides of the stage and within the audience’s line of sight.
Barral’s film work was all the more interesting and challenging because he needed to be careful about crossing the spatial axis that a viewer will understand while filming scenes in the immersive performances (the illusory 180-degree line between the characters in a scene who are facing either screen right or left).
His collaboration with Tzykun allowed him to capture angles impossible to achieve unless the camera was on-stage. “So you’re producing the live version and the live-streamed version, [and it was]very meaningful to allow the viewer to understand the staging and blocking of the shows.”
Barral added about his camera work in the center of the action, “It was even more about story. If you want the little moments, the reaction shots that make a show feel more cinematic, even though it’s live, I go for those details, up close, to bring that kind of immersive experience fully onto the screen.”
The cinematographer’s work meant that performers — and specifically, opera singers’ faces — were right there in the camera. And this is something these performers don’t ordinarily experience on-stage with an orchestra pit dividing them from the audience.
“Working with the cast, some of the singers had never worked in a film environment,” Barral described. “So it involved getting them into it and to sort of act more than sing. Singers today are more actors than they were before.”
It was also critical that these performers become comfortable with the man holding the camera before them.
“It involved creating the right environment so they would feel the camera is not an obstacle but develop trust and a relationship if the camera is up close to them,” Barral noted. “And if something doesn’t work, I tell them I’ll work together with you to make you look amazing. It’s an environment to be creative in front of the camera.”
A very special part of The Bohème Project’s performances actually happened at the end of “Rent” — when HIV patients and staff members at Grady Health System’s Ponce de Leon Center performed the musical’s hit song “Seasons of Love” alongside the show’s cast. This performance was shot and live-streamed onto the screens in the audience’s line of sight at Pullman Yards.
The impact of The End
“There’s a triptych [at play here],” Zvulun notes. “The Bohème Project [touched upon]the same story through three pandemics — tuberculosis, HIV, and the coronavirus. It’s an interesting exercise in looking at how history rhymes and how the same story repeats itself in different centuries.”
He adds, “And the same story can be told in different mediums — opera, musical theatre, and art — in all the ways [we told]it in The Bohème Project.”
“Now, people are watching The Atlanta Opera’s productions all over the world,” Zvulun closes.
The Atlanta Opera and The Atlanta Opera Film Studio have drained the ocean between art and audience. And in the process, opened up an expanse of opportunity for modern opera to thrive in Georgia’s Creative Economy.
Image courtesy of The Atlanta Opera from “La bohème”
This article appeared in the 2025 edition of the Creative Economy Journal. See more from the Journal here.
