Art for Kmart: A Very Long Opera House

Abstract

The production of an opera is as much an act of world building as an act of music. The operatic interior expands outward, carried by its audience and practitioners into a blended universe consisting of opera's constructed worlds and daily life. In the earliest era of opera, Baroque houses used flat scenography with forced perspective conveying the infinite. Technological systems and the operatic form evolved in tandem, resulting in the complex fly systems and acoustical engineering now associated with the opera house. Opera has struggled to adapt to the 21st century; perceived as an inaccessible art form, experimental models are slowly emerging, but new opera has not found easy footing in the US. Simultaneously, economic precarity has further removed rural regions of the US from cultural capitals, eroding the relationship of the arts with everyday life. This thesis imagines a future for opera in the United States where a new vision for the art form affirms community life through an intimate relationship with a quotidian typology. To house the new opera, the thesis converts an empty Kmart in rural Ohio, building drama through procession and reinventing the experience of opera. By exploring the unending flatness of the midwestern fieldscape, the project discovers the latent potential of the big box to host horizontally infinite artistic spectacle in the spirit of Versailles.