The People’s Opera House Project “Mutate or Die”
The People’s Opera House project is a social experiment in crowd-sourced creativity and participatory culture that engages the people in the urgent but frisky conversations of our time.  At this bio-technological moment in human history we the people would be wise to engage in conversations about Darwinism and natural selection being replaced by “directed evolution” through genetic engineering and about our rapidly approaching post human future. This “directed evolution” conversation and The People’s Opera House “Mutate or Die” project emerged out of my two attempts in 1996 and 2012 to make art out of the writer William S. Burroughs’ DNA. We, the edge workers of The People’s Opera House welcome you into the developmental phase of the adventure.

The making of a post-human bestiary – 3 questions for the people in 3 acts
At the core of The People’s Opera House project is an operatically enhanced, live cinema film and performance TPOH will be creating with the people entitled “Mutate or Die”. The people are invited into the “directed evolution” conversation by way of three questions, which correspond to the three acts of the operatically enhanced, live cinema performance. From the people’s answers will emerge a collective imagining of  our post-human future and a bestiary of hybrid beings that will more than likely populate our not-too-distant future.

Act 1
Immortality Blueprint
If you could transform your mortal body into an immortal body, how would you do it? Why would you do it? Put in another way, do you want to live forever?

Act 2
Would you?
Would you willingly contribute your DNA and/or give birth to the creation of a transgenic trans-human child that had human parts and parts from other species? What species might that be?

Act 3
“Mutate or Die”
What do you envision a trans-human will look, feel, sound and act like in say, two-hundred years, five-hundred years, a thousand…you choose?

Development Stage
The People’s Opera House Project “Mutate or Die”

How you can participate
Over the next several months, you are invited to participate in the developmental stage of The People’s Opera House project, which will consist of creating the “Mutate or Die” live cinema film and the performance to be presented in the summer of 2019. You can participate in these ways:

1) BE INTERVIEWED and respond to three questions for the three acts
2) CO-CREATE SCRIPT AND BESTIARY for the three acts in video, drawing, music, actions
3) JOIN THE TPOH ORCHESTRA of The People’s Opera House Project
4) AS A PERFORMER in The People’s Opera House “Mutate or Die”

Dates for Salons: TBD

Origins of the People’s Opera House Project
https://vimeo.com/212429409The first incarnation of The People’s Opera House was done in 2016 and was a collaboration between video and performance artist, Tony Allard and choreographer Aurora Lagattuta. It was presented in John Malashock’s Engagement Ring Series at the Dance Place, Liberty Station. Like the current project, The People’s Opera House at the Dance Place was an experiment in crowd-sourced creativity and democratized virtuosity and encompassed six dance studios which were transformed into immersive, interactive performance installations. It actively engaged the audience in choreographed and improvised dance, real time and pre-recorded video projections, live audio mixing, digital drawing and animation on mobile devices.