By Daniel J. Wakin, November 12, 2008
A watery reflection ripples beneath a boat gliding along the stage. Soldiers march over a field of grass. The blades rustle. Fire flutters above the face of a soprano singing of the burning flame of love.
Water, fire and field are all illusion, created by computers, infrared cameras, digital projectors and scrims. These uncanny scenes play out in a production of Berlioz's ''Damnation de Faust,'' which opens Friday night at the Metropolitan Opera and introduces an unprecedented level of technological stagecraft to the house.
While video and projection entered the opera staging manual years ago, this ''Faust'' is the Met's first interactive opera
. The technology allows the singers' motion and voices, as well as the sounds of the orchestra, to trigger and even shape video projections flashed onto the set.
''Just as no two performances sound the same, no two performances will look the same,'' said Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager. ''The whole thing is a kind of hallucination.''
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