Photo: Christy Pessagno.

A one-hour preview of Innova, a new opera from Object Collection‘s Travis Just and Kara Feely, is being presented through the rest of this week as part of the Incubator Arts Project’s Other Forces Festival at the East Village’s St. Mark’s Church. Featuring performers Doug Barrett, Avi Glickstein, Eric Magnus, Fulya Peker and Deborah Wallace, the project is “an experimental opera set within an urban grotto that evokes a cosmopolitan vision of productive decay and resonantly colliding languages. Five vocalists maintain an extensive live/work space that functions as a site for revised and invented topographies. Sifting through a baroque landscape of objects, tools, and scale models of unusual landmarks, the performers transform the stimulus around them into intricate sequences of action, diagrammatic displays, and a vigorous instrumental score,” according to the Web page for the performance (it’s the third entry down on the page).

This is Object Collection’s third opera, following Problem Radical(s) of 2009 and The Geometry of 2010; as composer Just and director/writer Feely reconceive the basis and function of opera for the twenty-first century through advances in music, they also provide a new kind of theatrical experience, simultaneously impassioned and coolly distant. Their work is a reconsideration of the fragmented technological culture that surrounds us: a method of multicultural and aesthetic collage, instead of linear narrative, drives the rhythms of their operas.

After this preview performance, the full three-hour version of Innova will be presented at the Abrons Arts Center in May of this year, so here’s a chance to sample. Innova runs tonight through 11 January at a variety of times; tickets are available online. For more about Object Collection, read Miriam Felton-Dansky’s feature on the company, which ran in the March 2010 issue of The Brooklyn Rail.