‘Upload’ Review: Living Forever on the Blockchain

Michel van der Aa’s film opera imagines what it would be like to leave your body behind to have your mind preserved in the digital world. 

By Heidi Waleson

March 24, 2022 5:52 pm ET

New York

Michel van der Aa’s work explores the intersection of music, film and technology. “Upload,” his haunting new film opera, which had its North American premiere at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday, skillfully harnesses all those elements to ask existential questions: What does it really mean to be alive, even as technology increasingly mediates and expands the space between life and death? Is it possible to be alive—and human—without a body? Even more important, is it possible to be human without pain?

The 85-minute piece starts in cavernous darkness. A disembodied soprano voice sings pairs of words that are all about physicality—“expand-lungs,” “pull-muscle,” “carry-weight.” A baritone voice joins in, alternating with its own word pairs. The list ends with “weight-less,” which is the current state of one of the two main characters. The story—Mr. Van der Aa wrote the eloquent libretto, in addition to composing the music and directing the show—is revealed through flashbacks. The Father (baritone Roderick Williams ), profoundly depressed after the death of his wife, has submitted to a radical new procedure. His mind has been uploaded and stored on a proprietary blockchain; his physical body and brain were destroyed. Post-transfer, he is visible to his beloved Daughter (soprano Julia Bullock ) as an avatar with no corporeal presence. Uploads, we discover, are minds freed of the infirmities of biology; they speak, feel, evolve and are eternal. 

The flaws in this seemingly ideal solution soon become apparent: The Father realizes that the unbearable trauma of abandonment that he was trying to escape is still part of him. He must now persuade the Daughter to “terminate” him or he will suffer forever. She, who was not consulted in advance about his upload and is distraught about his new state, is faced with the terrible prospect of having to kill him herself. 

The stage has a large screen at the rear and three movable screens in front of it. The action alternates between past and present. In the present, the Daughter appears live and the Father is an onscreen image. (The actual Mr. Williams is at the side of stage; his performance is transmitted in real time via motion capture technology.) The past, shown in a film that uses seven speaking actors, traces the process of being uploaded at the clinic.

Scenes set in the present are sung and brim with messy human emotionality, particularly from Ms. Bullock, who gives an unrestrained, impassioned performance. The yearning lyricism of her arias and the force of her untrammeled anger contrast with Mr. Williams’s more measured, articulated vocalism; Father and Daughter are arguing from different spheres. The 11-member orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, conducted by Otto Tausk, is often punchy and percussion-forward, mirroring the chaotic upheaval of the characters’ reality and its dramatic arc. When the instrumental texture smooths and thins, the characters are recalling a nostalgic past or envisioning an unknown future. In one of the most moving effects, a funereal organ sound accompanies matching arias as the two contemplate the possibility of eternal separation from each other.

By contrast, the all-spoken scenes of the film of the upload clinic imply a scientific confidence in perfectibility. The laboratories there are furnished with mysterious technological objects. Even creepier is the clean, corporate, youthful amiability of both the CEO ( Ashley Zukerman ) and the psychiatrist ( Katja Herbers ), who, in order to model the Father’s brain, interviews his brother-in-law ( Samuel West, startlingly recognizable as the curmudgeonly vet from “All Creatures Great and Small”). When there is live orchestral accompaniment for the film, it has a noisy, mechanical vibe, suggesting some stress underneath the smooth façade.

Similarly, Mr. Van der Aa’s varied, textured use of film elsewhere in the opera goes far beyond illustration. In the scenes with the Daughter in the present, it serves as the set, depicting a large New York loft and a roof garden, but is never quite static. Mr. Williams’s avatar is sometimes a straightforward copy; at others, it is hugely enlarged and pulsating in streams of pixels. Midway through the opera Ms. Bullock sings a gorgeous, meditative aria that tries to picture the Father’s present existence. As she muses, “This is where you are now,” images unfurl around her. They could be undersea reefs, subatomic structures or mathematical fractals—beautiful but uncategorizable to her or to us. 

And in the penultimate scene, as the Daughter lies in bed, trying to decide what to do, a huge sheet is lowered over the audience, showing enormous video images of the heads of Father and Daughter on their respective pillows, as if we were at an IMAX movie. Again, they sing the word pairs as they did in the beginning, and the images seem as real as the humans. We aren’t told what the final decision is, but here, the two appear at peace with each other, just as music, film, and technology have coalesced. Are we being lulled into acceptance, as we were visually seduced by those beautiful fractals? Mr. Van der Aa isn’t telling. 

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).