Tragedy, co-produced with the Opera North in Leeds, brings forth an altered experience of the infamous opera La traviata, presenting it in its entirety. Mimicking the framing device of a play within a play, the piece produces a production of production. The music guides the camera as it explores the fragility of the ‘live’ event. Throughout the work, we observe stage managers, technicians, costume dressers, props personnel and performers, bringing an operatic tradition into context with present-day realities and pronouncing the mechanics that create an experience. A new mise-en-scene for La traviata is presented, composed of its processes of routine labour around the stage while revealing a choreography of support situated between the culture of the workplace and the ‘grand narratives’ of the opera.

Keeping true to the ‘real-time’ of performance and in reference to live screen-based broadcasts, the screen’s attention is turned to the theatre that exists aside the stage. The live-ness relays moments of anticipation, cues and readiness that hold the tension and parallel the stakes of stage performance. Moments of pause and waiting - personal time – where discrete scenarios play out are the dramatic counterpoints. Reconceptualising the gestures of labour-in-time, of too early, too late, of stepping on and off stage as the imperative choreography, the work makes visible a peripheral space of performance whose actors/agents are a community of producers.