The Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the driest places in the world. Some regions get less than three millilitres of rain each year, resulting in a landscape so desolate that it is used by NASA to simulate the surface of Mars. Every few years however, when the conditions are just right, millions of flowers take bloom, bathing the dunes in vivid shades of purple, pink and white. This phenomenon is known as desierto florido – the flowering desert.

Across the Atlantic, Birmingham-based theatre company Infinite Opera debuts an experimental production to be performed in planetariums across the world. A cosmic, mythological story about searching for life in the places most devoid of it. Its title: The Flowering Desert.

Aside from a name, what links a contemporary opera and a floral climate phenomenon? The answer lies with exoplanetary explorer and University of Birmingham professor, Dr Amaury Triaud, and his stellar discovery.

Dr Triaud claims that working in the Atacama Desert is not unlike living in a monastery. Isolated from civilisation, with little choice of food or need for currency, the routine of an astronomer can be a meditative one.

The site of his scientific pilgrimage was La Silla Observatory. Home of several major telescopes, its seclusion from civilisation’s light pollution and literally breathtaking, headache-inducing altitude make it perfect for gazing out into the far reaches of space.

Triaud and his team were once the most successful exoplanet-finders in the world (‘exoplanet’ refers to any planet outside our solar system). They were eventually overtaken by NASA with their small investment of $1 billion, though they remain the people’s champions in our hearts.

Most exoplanets are detected using the ‘transit method’. This involves observing not the planet itself, but its star, waiting for moments where its starlight briefly dims, indicating that a planet has passed in front of it.

Photo by S. Brunier/ESO

Christmas of 2016 marked the height of summer at La Silla, but otherwise seemed a time like any other. The team was observing TRAPPIST-1, an ultracool dwarf star that lies in the Aquarius constellation, ten times smaller than our sun and about 40 lightyears away. At first, they saw two objects pass in front of the star; then three, then seven.

Planets were orbiting an a rapid rate. For reference, Mercury, the nearest planet to our sun, takes 88 days to make a complete orbit. The furthest planet away from the TRAPPIST-1 star takes only 19 days.

TRAPPIST quickly became an almost-unprecedented system, though not just for its sheer number of planets. Several of the them were also identified as temperate; this means that they could potentially retain liquid water, and therefore held the possibility of life.

Enter Infinite Opera – Birmingham’s very own contemporary opera company, with works under their belt such as ‘Besse’, the tale of a medieval beer brewer accused of witchcraft, and ‘Entanglement!’, a love story between two particles, bound by the laws of physics never to touch.

Triaud’s discovery forms the narrative centre of their latest piece, ‘The Flowering Desert’. The opera plays out in two parallel stories – a human and a non-human, separated by distance but quantumly entangled by fate.

Photo by Infinite Opera

When the sterile, lonely planet Pantele is told by the cosmic messenger Xoe that she is being observed by an astronomer on Earth, she becomes fascinated by the concept of life. She longs to harbour some form of life herself, undergoing a metamorphosis that is at once painful, sensual and abstract.

Roxanne Korda, librettist and co-founder of Infinite Opera, portrays Pantele in a masterful Mezzo Soprano that eases between graceful and eerie at her will. Pantele’s parent, the Mother Star, is a frightening, oppressive presence. Sung by a discordant chorus of voices, they counteract Pantele’s youthful, optimistic perspective.

Similarly to how we on Earth can only see one side of our moon, the planets of the TRAPPIST system are ‘tidally locked’. One side of each planet constantly receives its sun’s light and heat, whilst the other remains in perpetual darkness. Korda likens this to psychologist Carl Jung’s theories of the persona and the shadow. The ‘persona’ is our social mask that is visible to the world, contrasted by its ‘shadow’ – the repressed, unconscious aspects of our personality.

Pantele is based on a TRAPPIST planet, and is therefore also tidally locked. Korda plays with this idea by writing Pantele’s arias almost like dialogues between her persona and shadow, their contrasting forces guiding her through her own self-discovery.

The musical score was composed by Daniel Blanco Albert, the other directorial half of Infinite Opera. He used real orbital data of the planets in the TRAPPIST system to inform his composition, converting their cyclical movements into harmonic shapes to create an auditory scale-model of the system.

Albert argues that whilst art does imitate nature, it should not strive to be identical. He practises this by varying his musical form. When the narrative focuses on Pantele, the score moves away from the data, allowing his direction to better underscore her journey. Whereas when the story grounds itself in the human astronomer (‘The Measurer’), Albert leans into the abstract, repetitive musical patterns of the planets, leading to an uncanny and eerie tone to The Measurer’s thoughts.

Since the opera’s run of performances came to an end, The Flowering Desert has been adapted to film, letting audiovisual artist Leon Trimble take centre stage. Granular footage of the Atacama alongside Albert’s surreal soundscape accompany The Measurer’s whispered, ominous recitatives. Later, Pantele and Xoe are bathed in flower petals, blooming like the desert from which they are observed. Throughout the film’s test screening, I found myself hallucinating humanoid forms amongst Trimble’s shifting, fractal graphics.

This unintentional humanising of non-human forms was addressed during the creation process. Korda and Albert took a risk in attempting to write an opera – a medium famously centred around human relationships and drama – from a non-human perspective. In my opinion, they succeed. Under the all-encompassing planetarium screen, The Flowering Desert channels the incomprehensible majesty of watching a celestial creation story take place in front of your very eyes, leaving the audience to take from it what they will.

As Dr Triaud succinctly puts it, scientists of today are no different to ancient shamans gathered around a fire, making sense of the cosmos. We just use different tools.

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