For one night only during the Foo Foo Festival, the Saenger Theatre will become a canvas where opera, fashion, dance, music, and visual art come together in a completely unexpected way.

On November 4, Pensacola Opera will bring back Rock the Runway: Living Art, an immersive production that takes the familiar runway experience and gives it an operatic twist. Building on the momentum of last year’s sold-out performance, this year’s event brings together opera singers, Ballet Pensacola dancers, community models, a live DJ, and large-scale projections for an evening that’s as much performance art as it is fashion—an experimentation that only Foo Foo Festival makes possible, shares Pensacola Opera General Director Chandra McKern. “Foo Foo really allows us to think outside the box compared to what we normally do with our main stage productions and education events,” she says. “Thanks to the Foo Foo grant, we get to test the waters a little with fun and exciting events we might not be able to do in our normal season.”

Pensacola Opera has been part of Foo Foo Festival since its early days, using the fesetival as an opportunity to reach beyond the audiences who might already consider themselves opera fans. Rock the Runway has become a signature event in that effort, and each year, it has grown.

Last year’s event, Rock the Runway: Amped, moved from Vinyl Music Hall with its 300-seat capacity, to the Saenger Theatre, where roughly 1,600 guests could experience the expanded production. The response was strong, but audiences also made one thing clear: they wanted a little more opera. This year, McKern says, Pensacola Opera is listening.

Rather than simply adding opera back into the mix, the company is making the art form a significant part of the event’s foundation. Each segment will center on an iconic opera and begin with an opera diva and divo in full costume, makeup, and wigs, posed within frames onstage like living portraits. Their scene will be accompanied by a taste of live opera before the characters come to life and move throughout the space.

From there, a DJ will take classical music from the featured opera and blend it into a contemporary song as the models take the runway.

The fashion will follow the story, too. Participating retailers will curate looks inspired by the opera featured in the segment. The result is not quite a fashion show and not quite an opera—at least not in the traditional sense. “We call it ‘Living Art’ because there will be larger-than-life projections across the stage from floor to ceiling that will bring the music to life,” McKern says. “It’s absolutely not a fashion show. It’s more performance art.”

Those projections will help create the settings and atmosphere for each piece, turning the Saenger’s stage into a shifting visual landscape. Ballet Pensacola dancers will also help transition between scenes, moving through the space on pointe and becoming part of the runway experience themselves.

The music will move just as freely. Opera singers from Pensacola Opera’s Jan Miller Studio Artist program will perform live, giving audiences a taste of the power and immediacy of opera before the DJ takes the music in a more contemporary direction. “The modern selections are still being chosen, but the goal is to have energetic songs that get people moving, singing along, and having a good time,” McKern adds.

It’s a considerable undertaking, but that scale is part of the appeal. McKern sees it as an opportunity to bring together the many creative disciplines that make Pensacola’s arts community distinctive. “A lot of times, opera is the only art form that combines all the arts,” she says. “We’re uniquely placed with our event to be able to do that.”