“Salome is an incredible piece,” Braid shares, “I mean, you get the genius that is Strauss and then the genius that is Oscar Wilde; there are some beautiful lines in it. It’s incredibly poetic and so disturbing which is very fun to play and fun to experience.” The story of a young girl who leverages her stepfather’s desire to see her perform the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’, Salome demands that Herod award her the head of the man she adores who has refused to kiss or even look upon her. “The scene that we’re cutting to and doing in the show is essentially a love scene between her and a decapitated head,” Braid shares, expanding on the allure of such a disturbing dynamic. “The question is, does she know he’s dead? There’s all of these things you can do with it. She speaks to the head, ‘Why are your eyes shut? Why don’t you look at me? If you look at me you’ll fall in love with me’. So there is always a question of is she completely there, does she know what’s actually happening?” Audiences will have to interpret for themselves while occupying the same stage and space as Braid herself.

Though Salome was chosen as the opera to develop in the unique gallery space, Braid created five programming options that she’s begun to perform with friends in yet another untraditional venue: her barn, with an audience spread out on picnic blankets. “It’s quite a tactile and quite a physical experience because the proximity is different,” she comments about her ‘Opera in the Wild’ performances—which share this tactility with the coming installation. Maintaining the physical connection between voice and audience was Braid’s main priority in developing the concept with Kurtz and Rayment, since opera singers train their entire lives to sing without technical amplification. “The way the sound hits the body is unlike anything else,” she explains. “And that’s why so many people are moved to tears: it’s the acoustics. It gets into your bones and it reverberates and there are so few things that can do that. A live event was what mattered to me in the most safe way we can do it, because we’re missing that. And more than ever people need that; they need the human contact, the release, and a safe space to feel that power.”

“There’s a new degree of engagement and immersion for an audience,” says Kurtz. “We wouldn’t be having these thoughts and considerations and be dreaming up these kinds of shows if not for the fact that our entertainment choices have been so limited over the last 15 months.” He was impressed when they did a test run with Braid and the instrumentation to see “quite how unnecessary the visuals [of traditionally staged opera] can be in that setting, because if you put a voice like that and a pianist like that in a room and they just start playing… your mind is f***ing blown.” The installation space also offers innovative ways of sharing information with the audience; while opera audiences would normally have to scan what they can of a printed program before the lights go down, Rayment will create a program entirely of light wrapped around the projection space. “When guests first get there, they’re greeted by this immersive landscape explaining the show they’re about to see,” Rayment shares, saying this will include information about Strauss, Wilde, Braid, the synopsis and perhaps the tech too. “And then from there we’re going to transition into the actual performance, which will be a more focused experience at one end of the space.”