Enhance Your Experience
Videos, Reading & Resources

These resources are designed to enhance your enjoyment of Everest: An Immersive Experience. The opera is told as the individuals’ respective reports and flashbacks of those on the expedition. Here we show you how OP created this experience, explore the local relationship to Mt. Everest and what it is about the lure of the mountains that is endlessly enticing to humans.
Librettist Gene Scheer IN Conversation
with Beck Weathers
Opera Parallèle was so pleased to host an exclusive conversation between celebrated librettist Gene Scheer and the subject of his opera Everest, Beck Weathers. Watch to learn more about Beck’s extraordinary tale of survival from the 1996 Mt. Everest Disaster and hear from Gene about how he crafted these incredible stories into his opera.
EVerest Ice Breakers
Take a look behind the scenes of how Opera Parallèle created ‘Everest: An Immersive Experience’
Recording
Filming & Motion Capture
Movie Magic meets Opera
Music
Opera + Graphic Novels = A New Immersive Experience
Illustrations
Books

Into Thin Air
by Jon Krakauer

In the Shadow of the Mountain
by Silvia Vasquez-Lavado

Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest
by Beck Weathers

The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest
by Anatoli Boukreev & G. Weston DeWalt
WHY DO we climb?
Outside sports can have positive effects on physical and mental health. Yet a study in the European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience (Habelt et al, 2022) found that people with behavioral addiction in mountaineering display high levels of sensation-seeking, emotion regulation, and risk-taking. But what causes climbers not to rest, so that they can climb more summits and strive for the unreachable? Below are some more recent examples of climbers.
Climbing Mount Everest has become dangerously popular. John Oliver explains why

Lhakpa Sherpa sets Mount Everest women's climbing record

First all-Black team Full Circle Everest summits Mount Everest, makes history

14 Black Women Climb to top of Mount Kilimanjaro
The LOCALs’ RELATIONSHIP with Mt. Everest
Mount Everest is deeply connected to local cultural practices. Called Sagarmatha (Goddess of the Sky) by the Nepalese and Qomolungma (Goddess Mother of the Earth) by the Tibetans, the mountain is held to possess spiritual energy where that karma is amplified. But Everest accumulates the lees of those who attempt to conquer it, leaving the indigenous people to deal with it. The 1996 Mount Everest disaster received widespread attention and raised concerns about the commercialization of mountain climbing.
PASANG: In the Shadow of Everest chronicles Pasang Lhamu Sherpa’s tragic and inspiring journey to become the first Nepali woman to summit Everest in 1993.

Living in Everest’s shadow: the Sherpa people of Khumbu

How Tall Is Mount Everest? Hint: It's Changing

Mt. Everest's joint measurement marks new milestone in ties with Nepal & China
FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Audio Book: Beyond Possible: One Soldier, Fourteen Peaks, Life in the Death Zone (Nimsdai Purja, 2022)

Chicago teen makes history as youngest American woman to reach the top of Mt. Everest

Pakistani, 19, becomes youngest person to summit K2
