© 2018 Ellen Pearlman PAJ 118 (2018), pp. 43–46.  43 doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00394 3-D Opera Ellen Pearlman Blank Out , a chamber opera for soprano and 3-D flm, Michel van der Aa, composer, flm, and stage director, Dutch National Opera, Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY, September 21–27, 2017. A s an innovative work with moments of real poignancy, Blank Out incor- porated an avant-garde lineage of techniques into a visual and narrative twenty-first century dialectic in step with a wave of experimental operas popping up across the globe. A seventy-minute story that originally premiered in Amsterdam, its theme is loss and its tangled retrieval through the lens of traumatic memory. The performance relied on the non-linear interweaving of narrative that its director and composer, Michel van der Aa, has been formulating into his vision of an experimental language for the operatic stage. He also incorporated parts of poems from the South African poet, Ingrid Jonker (1933–1965), on whose life the opera is based. Jonker drowned herself when she was just thirty-one. Staged in the 55,000-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, replete with an eighty-foot ceiling, the site was either a set designer’s dream or a nightmare. The creators were tasked with challenges like pinpointing the exact viewing angle of the 3-D screen in terms of the audience’s perception. This was critical because both eyes must perceive the focal plane simultaneously and accurately, as a 3-D image is shaped, not only in the retina, but also deep within the folds of the brain. The opera begins with the sultry and pitch-perfect Swedish soprano, Miah Pers- son, as a “Woman” agonizing over the previous death of her seven-year-old son who accidentally drowned in the Dutch countryside. Persson appears simultane- ously on stage and in a 3-D prerecorded projected image. Three representations appear, one real and two virtual, but the 3-D projections at this time seem flat. The flesh and blood Woman, who is now moving stones strew about on stage, strolls over to a maquette of the house where she and her deceased son used to live together. Persson is tasked with becoming a de facto stagehand, moving an HD camera while creating a mise-en-scène that projects the interior and exterior