Gathered Apart

Presentation

Gathered Apart reimagines the aria Regnava nel silenzio from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor as a single live performance that unfolds simultaneously across physical and virtual spaces. The themes of haunting, memory and imagined presence make Lucia an ideal work through which to explore new forms of virtual presence, testing how opera can be experienced by audiences in different locations while ensuring each audience experiences the same live artistic moment.
In the theatre, a live singer performs the role of Lucia alongside a ghostly figure realised as a volumetrically captured hologram. In parallel, remote audiences experience the same performance through a VR headset, where both performers appear as live volumetric presences within a shared virtual environment. The scenography, lighting and surtitles are synchronised across both settings to ensure that each audience encounters the same performance moment, rather than two separate interpretations.
The work combines live performance with volumetric capture, real-time streaming and virtual environments to explore how performers and audiences can share a sense of presence across distance. The choice of scene centres on Lucia's encounter with a ghost, allowing the technology to serve a clear dramaturgical function.
The project is not asking whether technology can recreate live opera; it is asking how opera can remain a shared human experience as our lives become increasingly distributed across physical and digital spaces. It explores how connection can be maintained when performers and audiences are not co-located, and whether a coherent operatic experience can exist across multiple realities at once. Ultimately, it aims to define a format in which virtual and in-person audiences are equally considered in the artistic design.

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