The open-ended form of a new opera allows Tesla's prodigious visions and passion for electricity to live and breathe. Our highly visual production offers equivalents to Tesla's richly visual imagination. Violet Fire offers a compelling marriage of experimental art forms: the expansive soundscape of Jon Gibson's post-minimalist music; Miriam Seidel's poetic narrative; the integrative theatrical direction of Terry O'Reilly; and interactive media designed by Sarah Drury and Jen Simmons, paying homage to the spirit of Tesla's research. Together, they make for a theatrical experience that poignantly juxtaposes human performers against a streaming flow of large-scale imagery -- just as Tesla's visions seemed too large for one man.

Tesla lived and dreamed big. He attempted to build the first world broadcasting system, a huge tower that would beam information and energy around the world. He believed it would be possible to send energy and broadcast signals through the earth. Other ideas, including energy-based weapons shields and tapping the latent electrical energy of earth's ionosphere, were so far ahead of their time that they were never attempted while he lived. While some of them were realized and have affected us profoundly, others still hover in a kind of science-fiction layer of possibility. The dreamlike libretto and integrative staging of Violet Fire invites its audience to feel the mystery of how a great mind challenges the culture to the limits of what it can embrace.

In fact, Tesla's work is uniquely relevant to the technological changes we are experiencing now. Many of his inventions were wireless and gracefully interactive: for example, he charged his laboratory with an ambient electrical field so that light bulbs or tools would work upon his touch. Violet Fire offers a vision of Tesla as an icon for our increasingly wireless world.