Performers rehearse the upcoming immersive opera Orfeo, which will be staged at The Red in Beijing this weekend, as part of the 21st Beijing Music Festival. [Photo provided to China Daily]

First there's a wedding followed by a funeral, then you meet the desperate groom, the God of Hope, the idol bride and the King of the Underworld.

Revelry, blessings, hangovers, infatuation, pitfalls, interrogations, gossip and judgment pass by one after another.

This is the rehearsal of immersive opera Orfeo, and the show will be staged at The Red in the Sanlitun area of Beijing from Friday through Sunday, as part of the 21st Beijing Music Festival.

Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, created between the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Baroque period, is regarded as the origin of opera. And the story is based on the Greek legend of Orhoeus - a story of his descent to Hades and his fruitless attempt to bring his dead bride Eurydice back to the living world.

Zou Shuang, the writer and director of Orfeo, attempts to engage a contemporary audience by retelling this ancient tale.

"We decided to present a production with the aim of revisiting the spirit of Monteverdi's time," says Zou, who invited international musicians and collaborators to join her.

"This has always been the spirit of the Beijing Music Festival - to encourage new work and to welcome international creative talent from all around the world to make something unique," says Zou.

Zou has used all the theater devices from both the old art of opera and immersive theater.

"The audience not only watch the wedding, but they are invited to participate as guests. The audience can wander through the entire space as if at an actual wedding," says Zou.

As the wedding reaches its climax, the death of Eurydice is announced. And Orfro's vision of happiness falls apart, and gradually a contemporary version of Orfeo's journey starts.

While searching for the murderer he navigates through social media and gossip columns that gradually transform into a vision of hell.

Instead of asking the question as in the original myth - why did Orfeo look back - the audience sees that he is entering a future that is identical to his past.

"Orfeo's dilemma is everyone's dilemma today, trapped in social media and capitalism," says Zou.

Born and raised in Beijing, and is now the co-founder of the New York-based composer and performer ensemble Invisible Anatomy, Fay Kueen Wang is the composer of Orfeo, and also plays Eurydice and Pluto in the opera.

Performers rehearse the upcoming immersive opera Orfeo, which will be staged at The Red in Beijing this weekend, as part of the 21st Beijing Music Festival. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Speaking about the upcoming performance in a warehouse, Wang says: "The space is empty, and it's a challenge for me to prepare everything with my team.

"When I wrote Orfeo, I quoted the recognizable theme in the prologue of Monteverdi's version, engaging in a musical conversation across the centuries.

"The rest of the music is all original, and it's hard to be labeled as any genre, though you might hear strains of Baroque and Gothic, of primitivism and techno, of psychedelic jazz and prog rock."

Wang believes that "looking back" at the end of Orfeo contains the eternal struggles of human history and society, and is to make a choice about the past, the future, the "inner world", and the "outside world" of a man.

"It reflects the entanglements, anxieties and fears of every modern individual," says Wang.

Europe-based countertenor Li Meili, known for his "hugely attractive voice", plays Orfeo in the show and mezzo soprano Zhang Yajie plays Music & Hope.

Students from the Central Academy of Drama's department of Western opera are the chorus, and Wang says he is impressed by their performance during rehearsals.

Wang says the story is not restricted by time and space, and can take place in any city.

"Orfeo reflects the collective fate of humanity, like a gigantic work of glitch art made with unconventional and even 'wrong' interpretations of beauty. It's a wild performance art."