Business Traveller (Middle East)
FLEXIBLE FORMATS
The design elements within this modern, 2,000-seat venue are a world away from South Kensington, and most classical venues come to think of it; the last place I watched a production was in the stunning National Opera House of Ukraine in Kiev, and its resident opera and ballet company is even older than the Royal Albert Hall by four years.
But physically and conceptually, this is opera for the 21st century. Stalls seating around 900 guests are complemented by two circles (Royal, Grand) and series of boxes – eight on each side and nine across the middle. The auditorium is 12-14 metres wide and 8-9 metres high.
In classical theatre mode, it will be a horseshoe-shaped auditorium with stage, orchestra pit and audience – nothing unusual there – but then it starts to get avant-garde.
“When you have a concert, you don’t want that set up, you don’t need the pit and so the space retracts into the wings and up to the ceiling, and we have an acoustic shell which enables the sound to be amplified,” explains Hope.“Then you can’t have the boxes facing inwards, so they hinge back and we get a rectangular room, so they’re flat against the side walls, to allow the widest possible stage.”
In this set-up, everything sits on hydraulic platforms, which lower providing two floors of space, and seats can be rolled on wagons off into storage.“Then when we bring it back up – to a slightly higher level – that gives you a full 2,000sqm rectangle all on the same level for staging exhibitions, dinners, banquets or award ceremonies.”
With the design, he says the number of companies ran into the “hundreds”, covering interior design and sound, although he highlighted the experienced Theatre Projects Consultants (which worked on Muscat’s Royal Opera House), and South-Africa based proiect managers, Mirage Leisure and Development, for their primary input.
Just as the city’s malls offer far more than shopping, Dubai Opera is patently another benign misnomer. One of the more novel fixtures on the calendar is the Professional Squash Association (PSA) World Series Finals taking place in the next two years (June 6-10 2017, June 5-9 2018); a glass perspex court will go on stage with spectators seated around.
The breadth is welcome. With the exception of Dubai International Exhibition and Convention Centre, there isn’t anywhere which can truly call itself multi-functional. Moreover, flexibility rather than speciality makes commercial sense in today’s variable economic climate – even if some musical purists may bristle – and it has to be seen in the wider context of Dubai’s emerging status; lest we forget, The Royal Albert Hall has had an 145-year head start.