L.A. Dance Project's INVISIBLE CITIES Set for Union Station, 10/19

The Industry, LA's home for new and experimental opera, in partnership with the L.A. Dance Project and powered by Sennheiser, has announced Invisible Cities, an innovative production representing a thrilling new collaboration of art and technology that has never before been done.

Set in the spectacular setting of Los Angeles' iconic Union Station, while the station is still operating, the live performance will be experienced via premium wireless headphones from Sennheiser, exciting a new audience for cutting-edge opera in Los Angeles.

Premiering Saturday, October 19 for a limited run, this 70-minute world premiere opera will allow audiences to engage with the performers more intimately than ever before. Additionally, the use of headphones will make this meditative experience a highly intimate event for each spectator allowing the audience to act as a participant roaming freely through the station, following individual characters or creating their own adventure in the moment.

Invisible Cities is being funded through a mix of individual supporters, institutional sponsors, as well as a successful Kickstarter campaign, which raised more funds than its original pledged goal of $25,000.

"The opera will function as an invisible layer of everyday life, and every audience member will have a different, radically subjective experience of the opera," said Yuval Sharon, director of Invisible Cities and artistic director of The Industry. "It's an ideal way to bring Calvino's masterpiece to life and to hear Chris's quiet, haunting original score-all while celebrating a landmark of L.A.'s architecture."

Tickets for Invisible Cities will be available for purchase online at www.invisiblecitiesopera.com beginning in early September.

Composed and adapted by Christopher Cerrone (hailed as "a rising star" by the New Yorker), this fragile, quiet score attempts to capture "decaying sounds" through the use of found objects as instruments and pre-recorded voices interweaving with live voices. The instrumental music will be a mixture of pre-recorded and live performances from an eleven person orchestra.

During the course of the performance, all vocalists will sing live as they freely move throughout Union Station, appearing and disappearing into the everyday fabric of the building. Dancers from the L.A. Dance Project, the company founded by artistic director and choreographer director Benjamin Millepied, are featured in a site-specific new choreography by the LA-based Danielle Agami.

"L.A. Dance Project is incredibly excited to partner with The Industry for what promises to be a unique performance experience," said Millepied. "The kind of bold artistic adventure that makes L.A. so special."

The involvement of Sennheiser, a leader in sound and wireless transmission technology ensures that Invisible Cities will offer the highest possible sound reproduction without distortion, delay and interference. Due to the technological demands of this production, this type of performance would not have been possible even ten years ago.

"We are thrilled to be part of this incredibly creative production, which relies on Sennheiser's innovative wireless microphone and headphone technology as its technical foundation," commented Stefanie Reichert, director of strategic marketing, Sennheiser USA. "As our technology has evolved and become more sophisticated, Sennheiser has played a more central role in the creation of art rather than just be the supply of technical hardware. Our work with The Industry on this project is a testimony of the power of collaboration between the best technical and creative minds - and how these can shape and create unique user experiences. "

Based on Italo Calvino's fantastical novel, Invisible Cities imagines a meeting of the emperor Kublai Khan at the end of his life with the explorer Marco Polo. Khan orders Polo to report on the cities in his empire, and Polo's responses are flights of fancy, cities of the imagination and the mind. The opera depicts the meeting and describes five chimerical cities with a quiet stateliness that offers the audience a chance to contemplate the essence of travel, as well as our subjective experience of environment and time.

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