Research Seminar: Who Shapes the Opera? Immersive Opera, Emotion Engine and the Intelligent Stage

Location: Lecture Theatre 3, School of Music

Dr Alexandra Huang-Kokina (University of Manchester)

What happens when an opera responds to its audience while it is being performed, and even the singers do not know how it will end? This seminar explores this question through Ghost of the AI Empire, an immersive opera trilogy I created, produced and directed. Reimagining the Japanese ghost legend Yotsuya Kaidan in a near future ruled by an AI empire, this new work brings European opera into dynamic encounter with Japanese Noh theatre, free improvisation and gamification. It explores how immersive technologies, including projection mapping, a 360-degree environment, spatial sound and a gamified audience orchestra, can expand digital and physical creativity, without relinquishing control to algorithmic systems or relying on simulated participation.

Audience members can make choices on their phones that alter the stage action, while an ‘intelligent-stage system’ responds to the 'collective social emotion' in the hall. For example, they can calm or raise a storm during a sea voyage, influencing whether a fugitive reaches land, or collectively determine how a villain should be seduced. Theoretically, this work draws on innovation and collective-creativity scholarship to design new storytelling and audience-engagement mechanisms, and asks how immersive technology empowers new conditions for the audience as a collective to co-create a performance in real time.

Earlier versions of the opera were performed in Edinburgh and Lund in 2025. Building on this project, I ran a human–AI improvisation workshop in Manchester in May 2026 in collaboration with English National Opera’s Tuning into Opera initiative. An October workshop with Malmö Opera will explore co-creative human–AI futures, while a forthcoming collaboration with the Finnish National Opera’s Virtual Stage project will venture into extended-reality stage worlds. This seminar offers a look behind the scenes before the opera’s Manchester opening night at the University of Manchester’s Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall on 6 November 2026.

Dr Alexandra Huang-Kokina is a Bicentenary Music Fellow at the University of Manchester, concert pianist and Creative Director at Operactive Arts (a UK-based cultural enterprise for sustainable innovation in the performing arts). As an immersive opera maker, she has designed, co-written and directed sold-out opera shows infused with Japanese Noh and Kabuki theatre, improvisation and gamification. She currently leads the international workshop series, 'Future of Opera', exploring co-creative human-AI futures with opera companies, innovators and communities in Scandinavia, Japan and the UK. Alexandra's artistic practice directly informs her research at the intersection of performing arts, digital innovation, and collective creativity. Her current work harnesses immersive systems, AI and data science to expand participatory and co-creative possibilities in heritage performing arts, and has been published by Cambridge University Press, Routledge, and more. Her vision is to reimagine the future of performing arts, making historically exclusionary art forms like opera more accessible, engaging, and sustainable for a diverse range of audiences.

This will be a hybrid event. The guest speaker will be present with us in the School of Music, and colleagues and other guests are encouraged to join us there. But if you are unable to do so then please consider joining us via Teams.

No booking is required. Those wishing to attend online should contact series convenor Dr Mic Spencer (m.spencer@leeds.ac.uk).