Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
University of Sussex
TV opera: or, Love thrives in propinquity but dies on contact
This project explored how to translate the virtuosic energies of live opera performance onto the screen. It was presented as live and filmed performance simultaneously.
As TV/film, it challenged the problematic models of conventional filmed or broadcast relays of stage presentations (which decontextualise performance energy) and translations of opera into the mode of naturalistic film (which pretend no performance is taking place). It proposed instead that the energies of live operatic performance might be conveyed by making evident the parameters and constraints of capturing and transmitting performance.
As live performance that incorporated its own filmed event, it explored how audiences model 3d from 2d renderings, and vice versa. It sought a screen outcome which was a function of a performance, not a report of one, and a live performance which was a function of screen imagery, rather than only its subject.
Initial workshops (2008-11) explored technological means and performer tasks. Final workshops and presentation (Aldeburgh Music 2012) explored the use of the media in a live performance context, taking an existing operatic text, the Quartet ‘Ramingo e solo’ from Mozart's Idomeneo, chosen as a historical landmark in the potential for conveying conflicted emotions and interactions in a musical ensemble. The four singers combined physical gestures to convey their relational interactions, developed through contact improvisation, and the use of hand-held cameras to illuminate the characters’ (their own and others) inner lives. The quartet was performed both conventionally, and in deconstructive reformulations of speed, duration, structure.
Space and audience were divided. On side A audience were seated at a table inside the live performance. On side B audiences listened to this performance, but their visual experience consisted only of a composite of what the singers filmed live. Audiences then changed places, experiencing the alternative as the performance was repeated.
The project concluded with performer/audience feedback, and online publication through Aldeburgh Music.
