ITEAC 2014 First Keynote Speaker and Program Features Announced

	Tod Machover. Photo: Jonathan Williams

Tod Machover, "America's most wired composer" (The Los Angeles Times) is today announced as the opening keynote speaker of the International Theatre Engineering and Architecture Conference 2014 (ITEAC), kicking-off the three-day event in London on Sunday June, 8.

A 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Music finalist, Machover studied at The Juilliard School and was the first director of musical research at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM in Paris. He is the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab (Cambridge USA), where he is also director of its opera of the future group. Since 2006 he has been visiting professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Compositions by Machover have been commissioned and performed by ensembles and soloists throughout the world including Opera America, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony, Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin, Casa da Musica (Porto), and the Tokyo String Quartet. His work has been awarded numerous prizes and honors, among others, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Culture Ministry, and the French Culture Ministry.

Celebrated for designing new technologies for music performance and creation, Machover is especially known for his visionary operas, including VALIS (commissioned by the Centre Pompidou in Paris), Brain Opera (which invites the audience to collaborate live and online); Skellig (premiered at the Sage Gateshead in 2008); and the "robotic" Death and the Powers which premiered in Monaco, Boston, and Chicago throughout the 2010/2011 season. Most recently, Powers was produced by The Dallas Opera in February 2014, when it was also simulcast live -- with interactive enhancements -- to selected venues worldwide.

As creator, practitioner, researcher, and academic, Machover's innovative and evolutionary work will provide some fascinating lessons, aspirations and challenges to engage, inspire, and intrigue the delegates gathered at ITEAC 2014. His contribution is sure to whet the conference's appetite for the next three days of presentation, discussion, debate, and deliberation.

The program of this essential worldwide forum for the sharing of ideas and best practice will examine the lessons learned in the last four years and consider the challenges to be faced in the next and beyond.

Confirmed sessions for the future of performance spaces, where the people, the places, and the technologies will all be covered, include "The Opera House of the Future" and an examination of "Creating the Modern Cultural District," focusing on, among others, schemes in Asia and the Middle East.

ITEAC 2014 will seek to sensitively understand the lessons for theatre that can be learned following the tsunami and earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand respectively. There will also be sessions on the "Re-use of Existing Buildings," "Touring Technologies," "Evolving Standards in Stage Engineering," and the "Role of Arts Buildings in Urban Renewal."

A special session on the London Olympics -- the UK's largest global event since ITEAC 2010 -- has also been timetabled, forming part of the full program of sessions and speakers to be announced later this month.

Registration for ITEAC 2014 is open and further information can be found at the URL below.