A meeting of the creative minds will christen the brand new Voxel stage this week as playwright Lola B. Pierson and local avante-garde rockers Horse Lords premiere their joint venture, The First Thing That Happens, on Feb. 13.

The new experimental opera, from local theater company The Acme Corporation, is an exploration of the human experience that finds a series of actors struggling to make their ideas come across and come to life. It’s a meditation on “the construction of the piece itself and about what we as humans and artists give up to communicate with other people,” says Pierson, who wrote and directed the piece.

The idea was born from an earlier collaboration with Horse Lords’ Andrew Bernstein, who worked with Pierson on Azimuth for Baltimore Rock Opera Society in 2015.

“We both had a really good experience working together,” Pierson says. “I’m a pretty big fan of their work, and Acme does a fair amount of work with music. So I approached Horse Lords about a year ago about maybe doing another thing together, and they for some reason said yes.”

The partnership highlights the avant-garde sensibilities of both groups, and the creative process has allowed them to experiment with what exactly “opera” means.

“I’m not sure if classic opera people would call it that, but we’re calling it that,” Pierson says. She and Horse Lords have been working together since last summer in a back-and-forth process, adding and changing elements in a sort of ongoing conversation as they crafted the piece.

“They’re very flexible and adaptable people, and they’re a highly collaborative band,” Pierson says. “Day to day they embodied a thing that I think theater is all about, which is reacting to the thing that’s actually happening in the room. They said something in one of our first meetings where they were like, ‘We kind of think of our work as tricking people into dancing to avant-garde music. And I was like, ‘Oh, I think of my work as tricking people into feeling to avant-garde theater.’ We’re good teammates.”

The results of this team effort will be performed in seven acts on the newly minted Voxel stage from Feb. 13-March 1. It’s the first performance at the Old Goucher performance space (and former home of The Autograph), which is owned by local software company Figure 53. While its daytime mission is to be an education and exploratory resource for the community, by night it’s on offer as a DIY theater space for rotating resident artists. Pierson, who works part time with Figure 53, was selected to be the first artist to use the new black box theater to stage The First Thing That Happens.

The venue offers a flexible new space for performers, who can reconfigure the 70-100 seats as needed and have access to in-house professional lighting and audio equipment.

“Right now it looks like a big empty box that’s available to do whatever you want, which to me as an artist is the most exciting thing in the world,” Pierson says. “I think it really has the potential to be an incredible asset to the Baltimore performance community as a whole. The support and the artists’ community we have here feels unique, and it feels like there’s this really special moment going on.”

Before Chris Ashworth and a team of builders could install water lines for his new theater concept, The Voxel, they first had to tear through the old trolley tracks on 25th Street in its Old Goucher neighborhood.

Ashworth is the founder of Baltimore-based software company Figure 53, heading a small but mighty team that has expanded to satellite offices in Los Angeles and New York. The company’s main focus is creating programs that control elements of live shows like light and sound. An actor himself, Ashworth is in a unique position where his two passions—computer science and theatre—have coalesced into his life’s work. Now, he’s putting those interests to use in the transformation of the old Voxel theater.

“When I bought the building it was in pretty rough shape,” Ashworth says. “Now it has this potential to come back to life.”

Dating back to 1946, the building started as the Homewood Theatre and then became The Playhouse, a place to see movies. Part of a post-World War II boom, the theater was there for people who were feeling celebratory and ready to come back to a sense of normalcy.

Because it was later shut down due to safety concerns, the renovation project has become a massive undertaking. Neighbors have made it a point to recount stories of the theater’s past life to Ashworth and inquire details about the project. But he doesn’t plan to overextend himself.

Though Figure 53 isn’t going to completely pivot into becoming a production company in this new venture, Ashworth’s fingerprints will be on all aspects of the theater’s design.

“We’re going to do the interior design in what I hope is a subtle and classy way,” Ashworth says. “We tried to do the best we could with what we had and with the budget that we had.”

As for the production calendar, Ashworth has heard from fellow actors who are excited about performing in the space. When it opens around its target date of early next year, he anticipates that it will be a home for the city’s growing DIY theater scene, providing for local companies and productions that are additive and not necessarily in competition with other spaces. Comfortably accommodating audiences of 70-100, the venue could also feature live music performances.

“I suspect it would be a mix,” he says. “We’re not trying bring in national touring shows. A lot of the folks who work at Figure 53 have roots in the DIY theater scene. We’re gonna learn as we go. I have some stuff I want to aim toward, but I also want to leave it a little open-ended to learn about which direction fits us and Baltimore.”

There are also plans to nod to the theater’s history, including displaying its original projector in the lobby—which will feature theatrical typographic design cooked up by local company Post Typography.

Builders had to essentially gut the theater completely to get it to a point where it would be usable—a task that has been harder than anticipated, but has given Ashworth a new appreciation for the intricacies of theater spaces.

In some ways, Ashworth feels that the space is a nice complement to what Figure 53 does. The company will use it to host classes, where Ashworth and his employees teach how to operate their software and develop products themselves.

“It’s very natural—especially at this point in our growth as a company,” he says. “We have increasing numbers of people asking for training and we’ve never been able to host it ourselves. This gives us a space where we can set up to be just what we need.”

When it’s completed, The Voxel will be many things—a living relic, a working space, and a place for new and exciting theater productions in an area eager to take it all in.

“This is a passion project,” Ashworth says. “We can try some stuff and see what works and what doesn’t. I want it to be a resource in Baltimore.”