Alice MacGregor

Just a few years after the 1784 première of André Grétry’s Richard Coeur-de-Lion at the Salle Favart in Paris, the ripple effects of the French Revolution would be felt throughout the opera world. Championed by the monarchy under the patronage of Marie Antoinette, the genre had a complex journey through regime change.

There’s irony in the fact that Manitoba Underground Opera presented, as its 2024 season closer, an opéra fantastique about three staunchly heterosexual love stories in Canada’s longest-running gay bar. But “love is love” as they say, and with MUO’s production of Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann staged in the glittering Club 200, the venue proved an intriguing space for stage director Matthew Paris-Irvine’s (company debut) loud ‘n’ proud, gender-bending version of the opera.

A new research paper published in China purports to have shown how an artificial intelligence (AI) solution is able to check if people are loyal to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Developed by researchers at Hefei Comprehensive National Science Centre, the tool is supposedly able to analyse facial expressions and brainwaves to accurately determine the extent to which the person is receptive to “thought education”.