If you ever dreamed of writing your own opera, your time has finally come. Thanks to @youropera, you can now submit your tweets for inclusion in the first Twitter Opera, which will be performed at the Royal Opera House in London. The experiment started a few days ago and the final product will be performed during the Deloitte Ignite 09 festival in early September.
As of today, the project has arrived at the end of the first scene. While the plot so far is pleasantly bizarre, we’re not quite sure yet if this will be a total train wreck or a masterpiece of collaborative writing.
Here is the plot so far (you can find the line-by-line libretto here):
In brief, at the end of Act One, Scene One, William is languishing in a tower, having been kidnapped by a group of birds who are anxious for revenge after he has killed one of their number. Hans has promised to rescue him. The Woman With No Name is off to her biochemistry laboratory to make a potion to let people speak to the birds.
As was to be expected, not every Opera fan is excited about this project, but the Royal Opera clearly hopes to attract some attention with this project (though the number of submissions to @youropera only started to pick up today).
So far, Twitter definitely doesn’t look like it’s the right tool for writing an opera, but maybe the final result will surprise us all. If you want to participate, just tag your submissions with the #youropera hashtag.
