Tristan (Simon O’Neill) and Isolde (Tamara Wilson)

Left to right: Isolde (Tamara Wilson), King Marke (Eric Owens), and Tristan (Simon O’Neill)

Tristan (Simon O’Neill) and Isolde (Tamara Wilson)

Co-directors Zack Winokur and Lisenka Heijboer Castañón

8 p.m. Saturday, July 23, and Wednesday, July 27, Aug. 5, 11, 19, and 23

Santa Fe Opera, 301 Opera Dr.

Tickets are $44-$376, $15 for standing room; 505-986-5900, santafeopera.org

Opening next: M. Butterfly, 8:30 p.m. Saturday, July 30

“Video designer” or “projection designer” is a credit seen more and more often these days in the opera world. For the Tristan und Isolde creative team, video will be a critically important aspect of the production, supporting not only the narrative of events but also immersing the audience in the metaphysical world of the characters.

“This is a story that wants to float in time,” says Lisenka Heijboer Castañón, who is making her Santa Fe directorial debut with this production, along with co-director Zack Winokur. “In Tristan, I feel like we are often going somewhere and then everything is suspended. Projections are going to help create those moments where we’re stretching time.”

With an estimated running time of four and a half hours, Tristan und Isolde will be the longest opera ever staged here. It’s just as important for audience members to feel that time is suspended as it is for the characters. (If the opera and the staging work their magic, it will feel like the opposite of the famous quote about Wagner’s Parsifal: “It’s the kind of opera that starts at six o’clock and after three hours you look at your watch and it says 6:20.”)

When Castañón talks about the process for developing the projection designs, she uses words not often associated with this particular opera, such as fun and play. “When we met with [projection designer] Greg Emetaz at his apartment, we had the set model and tried out lots of things using a tiny projector he has, which was a lot of fun,” she says. “For all of us on the production team, play is such an important part of the creative process.”

“Forget the projections, Greg.” That was the not-very-prescient advice Emetaz’ thesis professor at New York University gave on his master’s degree project about 20 years ago, a Salome design featuring lots of video. Emetaz did, at least for a while, becoming involved with documentary filmmaking instead. He segued back into projection design via The Golden Ticket, an operatic version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that had its world premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2010.

The designer says there are three ways projections can be used in a production. The first is to create patterns or shapes with light (“It’s often easier and faster to do that with video than with traditional lighting instruments”) and the second is “like live scenic painting, where we’re effecting the way the set looks like a scenic painter does but can change it a lot more quickly and experiment much more in rehearsals.”

The third way is to have the projections become the audience’s primary focus, which can be incredibly useful or incredibly distracting. The latter is a particular danger in opera houses, Emetaz says. “The scale is so big that it can become very hard to focus on the real people onstage because they’re so small and seem to be moving so slowly.”

The Tristan projections fall into the “live scenic painting” category, and Emetaz describes it as “the most distilled use of video I’ve ever been involved with. Everything I’m creating is a shape, never an object.” In keeping with the emphasis on suspending time, some of his video cues take as long as 20 minutes from beginning to end.

Thanks to the flexibility around projections, the production team hasn’t made final decisions yet, but Emetaz described some of the options they’ve been exploring in lighting rehearsals. “The fact that the opera will start in daylight really influenced us. We’ve been looking at flooding the stage with bright white light, which could be taken away suddenly at key moments.

Left to right: Isolde (Tamara Wilson), King Marke (Eric Owens), and Tristan (Simon O’Neill)

“We’re also experimenting with the white light appearing in different ways, like rising slowly from the ground up, like it was flooding the stage, or listing from side to side. The set subtly suggests that it might be a ship in Act I, but we want to keep that sense abstract, rather than showing you ‘ship.’”

A very different use of projection may take place in Act III. Isolde may appear earlier than usual, as a “magical apparition” seen only as a shadow. “We’d film her during a stage lighting session,” Emetaz says, “and then use the film of her shadows without her being present onstage.”

There are several “firsts” around this production, including the first Wagner opera (that’s not The Flying Dutchman, anyway) to be staged here and the first Santa Fe appearances of soprano Tamara Wilson and tenor Simon O’Neill, in the title roles. Another first that’s gone a bit under the radar is the scenic design credit — the first to go to an architecture firm, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, which has offices in New York and Los Angeles.

Visual artists have often been asked to design stage scenery, with variable results. Architects very seldom are used, even though what they do with manipulating interior and exterior spaces and surfaces corresponds more closely with stage design than does visual art. The Charlap Hyman & Herrero website even uses Wagnerian terminology to describe its work: “[CHH aims] to create spaces that become worlds unto themselves, with gesamtkunstwerk at the core of the firm’s objective.”

The Tristan und Isolde scenic design is being created by the company’s principals, architect Andre Herrero and interior designer Adam Charlap Hyman. This will be their fourth opera production, starting with La Calisto at The Juilliard School in 2016, then continuing with A Little Night Music for the Dutch Touring Opera and The Coronation of Poppea for Cincinnati Opera, both in 2019.

Their set consists of two white V-shaped walls, a very large one that points upstage, away from the audience, and a smaller one, pointing downstage, nestled inside it — at least at first. “We knew right from the beginning that the set would be dynamic, almost kinetic,” Hyman says. “It’s moving or changing all the time, a kind of morphing machine that slowly changes, at times imperceptibly.”

In a production that followed Wagner’s stage directions literally, Act I would be set on a ship’s prow, Act II outside King Marke’s castle, and Act III outside the ruins of Tristan’s castle. In the Santa Fe staging, multiple locations are suggested within each act, defined by the lighting and projections and by the characters who are there rather than by décor. Conversely, there aren’t major “set changes” during the intermissions, so Act II begins not far from where Act I ended, and Act III close to where II ended.

“We hope it feels like time is passing and things are changing in an arc that feels very Wagnerian,” Hyman says.

A different kind of suspension of time also occurred with Tristan, which was originally scheduled to be performed in 2020. “We set it aside for a time,” Hyman says, “but it was still percolating in our minds and in the designers’. Having more time to be thorough was a silver lining of the delay. We’ve reduced and reduced so that it’s not minimalist, but it is more streamlined and elemental. The process of taking things away was really a luxury.”

Asked what advice she would give Santa Fe audiences who are unfamiliar with the length of Wagner productions, Castañón says, “Come in with an open heart and an open mind, and let yourself surrender to it. Tristan is a type of meditation, which is a very specific and beautiful theatrical experience. There will be moments when you drift away, and you meet yourself in a new place, thinking about whatever the piece has evoked in you. It triggers memories in a lovely way, sitting still in the dark in this beautiful place.” 

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