A 2013 production of “Invisible Cities,” the composer Christopher Cerrone’s adaptation of Italo Calvino’s imaginary travelogue, took place in Los Angeles’s Union Station, one of the busiest passenger railroad terminals in the country performers moved around the space as concertgoers listened on wireless headphones (and commuters raced for their trains). He founded an experimental company, cheekily named the Industry, in Los Angeles in 2012, and was met with near-immediate acclaim for stagings so wildly inventive they often dispensed with stages altogether. Now 42, Sharon is the most visionary opera director of his generation. Sharon paced the perimeter in a bow tie, a colorful jacket and yellow sneakers. A pair of low stages, minimally dressed to set a banquet scene, had been assembled, and the rest of the space was hauntingly lit, with an orchestra on the same level as the audience, whose members were free to sit or orbit at their leisure, entering or leaving at any part of the show, which began at noon and ended at midnight. Looking over its edge, I spotted a dusty Jeep parked on a lower level with the words LIONS SUCK traced on the windshield. The production was pay-what-you-like, and those of us in the audience reached the performance space by walking up a ramp. The sight of cars parked beneath moldering Renaissance-style plasterwork and traces of long-gone balconies has long proved irresistible to Detroit ruin photographers, but no one before Sharon had ever staged a live performance among them. Sharon’s production took place in what was once the Michigan Building Theater, a former Detroit movie palace that closed in 1976 infamously, when architects determined that demolishing the theater would make an adjoining office building structurally unsound, the interior was gutted and transformed into a multilevel garage. Last September, as cultural organizations began their fall seasons in a state of crisis, unsure if audiences would venture from their homes in the midst of a pandemic, Yuval Sharon, the artistic director of the Michigan Opera Theater, decided to mount a show called “Bliss.” A restaging of a marathon piece by the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, “Bliss” requires its performers to replay the final three minutes of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” without pause for 12 hours. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
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