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First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
What are the possibilities within opera that make it an attractive proposition to video artists, as a
medium of minority spectatorship, at a time when video installation is the dominant medium of art
exhibition in museums and galleries?
People are wrong when they say opera is not what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That is what's wrong with it. (Coward 1933/72) A key facet of our present vastly expanded multimedia world has been
the exploration of an entirely new form of interdisciplinary art, what
Rogala and Moore (1993) have called “video theatre”, and termed
variously by others as “multimedia opera” (Oliverio and Pair 1996;
Cohn 2003). Interchangeably, both terms have arisen to define a now
highly active and diverse theatrical form emergent from the mid-
1970’s, synthesised from two very distinct traditions. What is
remarkable, however, is how little stir this distinct and exciting field
has generated within academic literature.
There is then limited use in regurgitating the sort of meta-narrative—
one of few—put forwards by the likes of Townsend (2007a; b), rather a
more fortuitous contribution might be an investigation into some of
the aesthetic positions currently being explored which are quite
extraneous to a grounding in the gallery conception of video. This
seems more appropriate to the current post-modern climate, since it is
increasingly difficult to make the assumption that there exists either a
definable body of video artists with some sort of prescribed relationship
with the establishment, or therefore a uniform set of aspirations. For in
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
so far as we continue to witness the transgression of Wikipedia-listed
names into the genre, with Reich’s The Cave, Viola’s newfound
affinity for Wagnerian spectacle, equally pioneering are those growing
number of works emerging from origins far less familiar. So this will
not necessarily form per se a “blueprint for use” so much as consolidate
opportunities; authenticity (after institutional liberation); space; scale;
movement; time and the event; and process and performance for
future consideration. This said, I propose that what video needs—as a
medium with a calculated history of challenges to, and satires of the
status quo—is a to challenge the medium of opera itself, to which some
space will be accorded.
Some Words on Multimedia
The portmanteau of “multimedia” is problematic especially when used
as frequently is to conjoin video to traditionally, non-electronically
mediated forms such as theatre. In nearly every instance of video,
opera and other time-based mediums, meaning is constructed and
communicated through the interaction between individual medias,
including image, dialogue, music, and costume operating at varying
degrees of congruity. Individually, these may comprise true
multimedia forms; as arguably the most abstract of these music
frequently enlists lyrics to establish a viable meaning more obvious
than its abstract form (Cook 2000). In turn with any instance of
multimedia, the staging environment mediates the meaning generated
by these media operating simultaneously; a single-channel videotape
or feed may be perceived as meaningless repeated television outside the
superimposed art product meaning structures of gallery exhibition
(Rogala and Moore 1993). It is imperative to divorce from this genre a
term popularised in the 1990’s to market new forms of non-traditional
media with catch-all definition.
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
Two Mediums
Video and opera are equally problematic taxonomical cases needing
definition of scope. In its immaturity during the 1960’s, video-art
shared between its practitioners some defining characteristics; a
manifesto of challenge to modernist aesthetics of information and
cultural production, artist-centred perspective, feedback and self-
reflexivity as spatial and formal strategies, besides uniform physical
mediums of production and exhibition. What can be termed ‘post-
video-art’ from the 1980’s onwards retains much of the early hybrid
interdisciplinary aesthetics and history from film, literature, and art,
and some concerns of exhibition, but much has changed, not least
according to technological advancement including electronic editing
(Hanshardt 1985; Wooster, 1985). There is little evidence of the
unwavering neo-Dadaist anti-establishmentarianism, anti-
commercialism of the Fluxus artists, or—after the failure of
McLuhan’s, naively optimistic Global Village manifesto to manifest
itself—much potential left in the mass-media critiques of the likes of
Serra’s Television Delivers People (1973) (McLuhan 1967). Exhibition
is oft that of multi-screen projection and the medium of production
and storage that of solid-state, hard-drive or layered media.
The vicissitude of opera since the 1900’s makes it no less difficult (or
desirable) to characterise generically or even define. For the narrowest
definition, ‘a drama in which actors sing throughout’ (Mayer-Brown
2007) barely irons out the cinematic lesions of Slavic opera, or the
sprechstimme of the Viennese modernists, let alone the veritable array
of theatrical forms since so described. More so than any period prior,
the 20th- and 21st-centuries witness a clear demarcation between the
naturalistic aspirations of the Modernist avant-garde and otherwise
regular regurgitation of Brechtian epics (everything lyrical from
Handel to Mozart to Wagner, and back again) negotiated around the
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
Schoenbergian “mistake.” Major operatic administrations have
retreated to the security of populist demand for lyrical fantasies,
referring numerous inheritors of the Pierrot Lunaire—Wozzeck
chamber line to various specialist festivals, pop-up performance
collectives of a still smaller spectatorship, and limited permanence
through irregular CD releases (Whittall 2007). (The generation of late-
modernist ‘exiled’ British composers including Finnissy et al. whose
theatrical works receive Continental acclaim but indifference at home
particularly pronounces the reluctance of the highly conservative UK
theatre industry to take risks. And with justification; it was enough to
draw numerous sniggered exasperations of “but I can’t understand
music” while presenting scores of Bizet’s Carmen to Glyndebourne
members for a sing-along at a recent workshop day.)
To my mind this demarcation underpins divergent ideologies and
aesthetics driving the field of videopera forwards. The writ seems to
have been a tendency away from the asyndetonic Satiean-Picabia-type
models of Entr’acte forming visual interlude featurettes within an
external linear narrative, opting instead for seamless narrative
integrations with libretto, a logical extension of the gesamkunstwerk
cultural prototype (Adorno 1966), but with highly varying results. The
surrealist intentions of Azguime’s Salt Itinerary (2006), instances of
which use installation feedback to sculpture vocal timbres to dramatic
movement, differs quite drastically by example from the pre-recorded
Christian—Sufist mystic narrative of Sellers’ and Viola’s Tristan und
Isolde, or the ‘tv reality’ of Oliva’s and Kalha’s The Girl Who Liked To
Be Thrown Around (2007), to the multi-screen realities of Reich’s The
Cave (1992), Three Tales (2002), yet again to immersive 360’ degree
projection sci-fi fantasy of Steinhäuser’s and Baumhof’s C—the speed
of light (Phase-7 2005). There are of course no simple dichotomies of
pre- versus post-, renewed versus new, interlude versus integrated nor
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
any recognisable Zeitgeist governing the video—opera oeuvre; even
barely scratching the surface one finds diverse realisations from
provenance quite similar.
Authenticity
Mass democratisation of the sort conspicuously absent and unlikely—
if not impossible—within the operatic medium has proven the
principal driving force behind development in creative use of video
medias. Aspiring artists, performance artists, and cinematographers of
Generation Y, particularly those choosing interdisciplinary
environments, are increasingly able to operate independently of the
traditional gallery structure, more easily and proactively exhibiting and
disseminating art products via personalised new media channels,
including cyberspace. Firstly, globalising technology markets and
manufacturing has led to easy availability of low-investment
(financially and technically) increasingly miniaturised and convenient
consumer video recorders. In turn digitisation, or more specifically the
ability to edit in a non-linear fashion whilst reproducing a wide array
of digital effects—including but by no means limited to the jejune
attempts of video—has been welcomed by the establishment of a
demanding market for entrance-level consumer editing applications.
Competitive pricing at the pro-sumer level, between software such as
Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, and hardware including storage space
(and speed) and crunching power, have made desktop workstations
and the ability to manipulate quantities of raw video increasingly the
domain of the many. Since finding stable habitats in Youtube,
Atomfilms, video-art.net, amongst others, vernacular video in both
raw and “creatively edited” form has proliferated dramatically.
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
A misgiving of this is that the “serious” video artist of today—or at
least those desiring the commodification of their art product for a body
of collectors—is constantly fighting for attention, perhaps more
specifically, the ownership of an “authentic” artefact. The Fluxus
desires to operate independently of art institutions may have had some
success, but were ultimately proven to hold a misguided confidence in
the efficacy of non-commercial, specialised broadcasting and a
plethora of individual artist-led events and activities to disseminate
their work. It may be writ large that “video art is fundamentally
different from broadcast television… [it] is intensely personal—a
reflection of individual passions and consciousness,” (Huffman 1985)
but the practical implications of video as aesthetically similar to
television are somewhat harder to disperse; it risks being dismissed as
just another simulacra (Baudrillard, 1981).
It may not be so easy to define such terms as authenticity in a post-
industrial consumer society, in which mass media routinely substitutes
“proto-realistic signs” (Zurbrugg, 1986) for “real” objects, but
historically at least such values resided in direct human relationships
with cultural artefacts considered non-perishable, and in turn were
historically retrievable (Cook, 2000; Benjamin, 1938). This in turn
assumes, in the case of the arts, the formulation of discourse on such a
collection of items by those owning sufficient social and intellectual
capital, as an important means to authorise and augment authenticity;
something resembling theoretical literature to establish its meaning
and use. In popular conception at least, opera—old or new—possesses
both, being by default either representative of or inheritor to a
trajectory of catalogued texts, translated into commodity form by
practiced professionals (many constructed to cult status) from
recognised pedagogical society. It is not so predictable to say that video
in its early stages was devoid of authenticity—maybe limited to
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
localised perceptions of its creator—but it is fair to say that it was
culturally outmanoeuvred by film and more traditional forms at least
until it entered (and became dependent upon) the art institution
structure, and correspondingly became worthy of formalised discourse.
It would be wrong, however, to allude to the suggestion that video
“hijacks” opera to the ends of its own authenticity or acceptance
within “the right circles,” for equally prominent are those instances in
which it is integrated into “realist” drama precisely because of its
proximity to vernacular video and TV, to culturally outmanoeuvre the
“pretence” of opera (Busoni 1965).
Institutionalisation
For video then, authenticity—a necessary precursor to consumption—
has resided in the institutional gallery space, with which it has
traditionally shared an uneasy, if now cosy, relationship. The neo-
Dadaist roots of the medium professed some quite clear hostilities
towards the establishment (indeed the irony of obsessively
institutionalising the work of the Fluxus artists appears to have been
lost on contemporary museum curators), which was later reconciled in
the 1970s by the likes of Oppenheim, Nauman, Acconci who saw
instead a means to take the challenge to the gallery. In the present, it
may offer more simply a pragmatic means of “getting out there,”
finding an audience to avoid recourse to the vernacular settings in a
vastly competitive culture. Indeed, depending on your prospective
purpose, video has either gained or lost spectacularly from its
relationship with the gallery; spectatorship, authenticity,
commodification, provided that some distillation from avant-garde to
rear guard is an acceptable trade-off.
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
The latter is inevitably the case since institutionalised video must be all
things to all people, by default identifiably related to popular video,
but also culturally “authentic”, the inevitable collision of which has
been a retreat to designs familiar from cinematic practice, music-video,
painting, and photography. Neither does the social position of the
gallery engender it to serving up quantities of avant-garde material,
rather an organised set of refined and recognisable artefacts, to which
audiences—who have now fairly narrow expectations—can bring their
predefined artistic understanding and expectations. These aspects and
in a sense the “novelty” of video place central to the relevance of
institutions themselves; a form of eye candy for yuppiedom, invariably
expecting an aesthetically refined form. This resides itself in the
accessibility and immediacy of video, a time-based medium—similar to
music—able to construct highly affective responses and immediately
engaging material, so well suited to audiences with increasingly short
attention spans and lacking patience with stationary media.
Emblematic of this is the inability of artists to “control” the
engagement of time within the gallery as audiences enrolment in
installations tends be erratic and unplanned, mannerisms that are
hardly gratifying for work that, as in the example of Viola, Marclay, et
al. have been meticulously constructed.
Inclusion for video within and perpetuation throughout the art
establishment necessarily entails the imposition of form over subject,
towards retrospective models of production rather than formulation of
an artist’s “brand” of video aesthetic; often very little compromise
towards forms subversive of the project of pseudo-liberalism (critical
documentary); the likelihood that emerging artists will not be accorded
individual “spaces of meaning” but rather shared with pieces of
competing, or potentially conflicting intentions; acknowledgement
that there emerges consequently little long-term relationship or even
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
anything beyond superficial understanding between audience and
artist; and ultimately coming to confirm the irretrievability of video,
having no particular “event” space with which to associate (and
nothing similar to the distribution networks of music, film and plate
art). Opera then offers a means to escape the aesthetic binds placed on
video inherent within the institutions, and of further importance to
those not currently embezzled in the establishment structure, a means
towards an audience, and ultimately sustenance.
Now clearly bourgeoisie kitted out with DVcams and iMovie are not
surging forwards this way and that straight onto the stage at Covent
Garden, and what follows is based on the earlier asserted simplification
of operatic trends into broadly two registers; the interminable
restagings of repertoire opera lyrical, with high accessibility and facility
towards nearly exclusively audiences of fairly uniform (conservative)
perception and requirement towards the medium, and—although not
diametrically opposed—the pressure points of chamber opera
productions which substitute such delusions of grandeur for inclusive
attitude towards both repertoire (often cerebral), and audience type,
the dominant discourse of which continues to be anti-instrumentalist
and against the credo of neo-romanticism. The bastions of the genre
make more regular commitments today towards the less prominent
romantic repertoire, but it is symptomatic nonetheless that these are
greeted with lesser optimism than those in which the audience can
easily recognise an aria or two.
In the first instance the inevitability of restaging outmoded bodies of
works necessarily suggests the need to find some form of
individualistic vision for producers, which offers opportunity for video.
But it is certainly the case that with each new restaging, learned
audiences have their commitment (memory-based) to the tradition
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
rather than each recurring performance, and so the route for
productions incorporating video to perpetuate themselves necessarily
lies with meeting the audience at least half way; repertoire lyrical may
be problematically patriarchal thus for video. The 2005 spectacle of
Viola’s piece for Sellar’s Tristan und Isolde is a natural conclusion if
anything closer to its derivate 13th-century legend Tristan & Iseult,
and the same might be said of Hopkin’s video implementation into a
recent staging of Britten’s Owen Wingrave in which technological
mediation was rather more awkwardly framed within the limits of the
original text. Although representing equally valid aesthetic positions,
the mannerisms of both video appropriations are each appropriately
clichéd to audience expectation, and it is dubious in this respect
whether their positions could be inverted; realist TV for Tristan and
cinematic spectacle for Owen Wingrave? Certainly lyrical opera opens
up the ideological opportunity for event status, authenticity,
individuality which are more dubious within the gallery, but
conservatism strangles the space for exploiting more idiomatic, avant-
garde tendencies of video, example highly exploitative feedback, which
are invariably better suited to the pressure points of high-modernist, or
post-modernist opera, new or existing repertoire (see; Process &
Performance). Opportunity is of course subject to ideology, and in so
far as the real opportunities for the video-artist might lie in the popular
repertoire of opera, the real opportunities for video might lie elsewhere.
Space and Scale
A defining characteristic of videopera has been its categorical and
unapologetic rejection of the limitations of space within the
institutional exhibition in favour of a more flexible and—need it be
said—theatrical exploration. As the title of this paper suggests, video
redefined gallery space but it has largely remained in check by the need
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
to retain large appeal to audiences that are inevitably transitory and
explore space through time from multiple viewpoints; videopera is a
natural conclusion for artists for whom this choice of perspective is
problematic.
It is no coincidence that the majority of the artists defining the video
medium early on had crossed from interdisciplinary sculpture and
architecture, including Serra, Nauman, Oppenheim, and Acconci.
Here Flavin’s site-specific constructions with light of the early 60’s
were instructional. The deconstruction of audience autonomy and
perspective within the gallery space through a combination of
“barriers”, and “corridors” provided a model of physical restriction for
the later “invasive” surveillance installations of Nauman, Acconci and
Oppenheim (see; Levine 1978). Following from the model drawn in
Nauman’s Live/Taped Video Corridor and Corridor Installation (both
1970) these sought to push audiences into self-reflexive analyses of
their own psychosomatics and behaviourism by forcibly directing
viewers into claustrophobic gallery spaces through the path of cameras
that fed their image back to monitors.
The intimate spaces of such radically phenomological experiments
were not the only means by which gallery space was being redefined
around this period however, and only explain in part the application of
space within opera. Influential too are those works exploring audience
experience’s of space and perspective within multi-dimensional
structures as in Nauman’s Clown Torture (1987) or Oppenheim’s Echo
(1973). Equally significant are those examples as Viola’s Slowly
Turning Narrative and Threshold (both 1992), Tiny Deaths (1993), and
since the stage in videopera is often conceived as a room within the
room of the video, Room for St. John of the Cross (1983) may be a
more direct contribution. It is in the space between as Iles (2000) calls
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
it the “sculptural” and the “cinematic”, as large-scale projection
technology enabled video to become less problematically self-centred,
that attraction towards opera becomes obvious and to a degree
inevitable.
Opera going depends on a controlled audience space, in which its bon-
vivants ascend hierarchically in proportion to status with the
interminable aim of satisfying themselves of owning the best
perspective, clarity and depth of the staged space. It is within the
expectations to facilitate clear vision of the focal points of dramatic
action, and that unlike the gallery, attention be uninterrupted by the
transgression of push-chairs around the installation towards alternative
perspectives or destinations. To video artists this offers the ability to
both recreate the “reality” and conventions of the cinematic spectacle
and through interaction with the stage space, the viewpoint of which is
strictly controlled, to physically extend the depth of field beyond that
which can only be implied within the flat topology of screen. The
spectacle of Viola’s installation for Tristan, for example, depends on a
Ex. 1 Above top: ‘Purification’ from Viola’s installation for Tristan und Isolde (2005). Courtesy of Haunch of Venison, London: Kira Perov
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
scaled space not widely available within the gallery institution but
readily so within opera houses. It is not incidental either that Viola
frequently conceives of scenes in Tristan in spatial terms similar to the
size of operatic stage, often defined physically between the lens and an
elemental boundary, including fire and water. Where an infinite depth
is implied too, the light fall off within the video images often serves to
delimit the foreground space within similar dimensions; witness and
Purification (Ex1), and The Fall Into Paradise, (Ex2). A recurrent
direction is the progress by one or both protagonists within the
installation space towards the viewer’s natural centre of focus on the
minimal stage set (see; Movement). Viola manipulates the stage
space—which besides Forbis’ (Tristan), Gasteen’s (Isolde), and White’s
(Marke) variable integration with a multi-purpose bench, is otherwise
Ex. 2 Above: ‘Fall into Paradise’ from Ibid.
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
sparsely set—to project real depth into the simulacra of the flat screen.
In other words, the set brings the means to elect between a
conventional two-dimensional canvas (within the video alone) and a
true three-dimensional space, within which the cinematic angle (“low
angle”, “eye level” and so forth) gains a further plane based on the
placement of performers and objects between the audience and the
projection. Viewed at several times the length of the stage across the
auditorium, the seamless flow of focal attention from stage to screen
seems somehow familiar, common to orchestra—choir relationships.
The remodelling of the Bastille opera house for Viola’s installation
depended of course on significant technological mediation; this
explains, in part why there is no record of first generation Portapak—
single or multi-screen television being reconciled with large operatic
spaces (see; Process & Performance). Robert Ashley’s self-proclaimed
“talking heads” television opera Music with Roots in the Aether (1976)
may seem at odds with this statement since it has been subject to small
screen installation, but it is first and foremost a documentary narrative
conceived with music, and although a “rudimentary form of opera
emerges” (Sabatini, 2005), its conception is hardly operatic, nor
appropriates theatrical space. As Townsend (2007a) notes too, scaled
back-stage projection too was hindered by the absence of back-stage
space within opera houses that have needed to regularly expand seating
and staging capacity throughout the 19th- and 20th-centuries to the
detriment of nearly elsewhere. Equally it is tempting to see neo-
Romantic opera productions as too determinedly self-indulgent in the
wake of the expressionist challenge (equally minimalism) to have space
for competing media. As an inheritor to that and moreover the
Wagnerian tradition, Viola’s piece commands an enviable position
(arguably), responding to its assuredly vast audience it must saturate
the space it commands, it must be the spectacle of the spectacle, the
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
Schopenhauerian sublime, if proclaimed not in sweeping musical
gestures then in opulent Hi-Definition video. As such it may be
perfectly suited to “the opera” (ultimately it can only co-exist with
such), if too full of cliché to be “artistically” operatic.
Chamber Space
Control over perspective, of course only improves when space and
aspect are constrained further, and this in turns suggests greater
empowerment for the spatial strategies of video in chamber operas.
Many such positions have emerged in reflection of the obsolesce of
romantic operatic forms, and objective criticism of both Kantian
discourse and the cerebralism of high-expressionist opera, instead
exploring more grounded aesthetics in what might broadly be called
“reality” operas. It was mentioned earlier that video can be beneficial
in its stylistic approximation of Television, particularly through the use
of documentary and naturalistic editing, and this depends more
particularly on the ability to keep audience’s vantage points close
together (impossible within the grand auditoriums) so that changes
between low angle and eye level, for example, are perceptually
uniform. Oliva’s and Kalha’s operatic monody The Girl Who Liked To
Be Thrown Around (2006) invokes this alternation between two
aspects as a meta-narrative theme, cutting between slow motion street
progresses juxtaposed against various eye-level shots including facial
close ups (see ex. 3). So there is in this since a symbiosis between the
aesthetics of space (very constrained set of audience vantage points)
and resources of space (small scale theatre), ready-made for the anti-
spectacular opera.
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Space, or perhaps the perception of space in video opera is not
intrinsically within its physically constructed dimensions, but defined
rather by metaphysical interactions with other sensory stimuli
projected into what is otherwise a void: acoustic (which is a given);
Ex. 3 Above and below: Two scenes from The Girl Who Liked to Be Thrown Around, Michael Oliva & Deepak Kalha, at the Royal College of Music (2006). Reproduced courtesy of the composer.
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
visuals (intensity and colour of lighting), olfactory (theoretically, but
there is little history of application), and kinetic (see; Movement,
below) which combined constitute our understanding of space through
time (see; Time and Event). The aesthetic attraction of video-theatre
before gallery video might then be the freedom with which all of these
aspects can be manipulated to unfurl within a defined linear timeline
to which audiences are committed, whilst in the latter setting not only
does one or more tend to be inevitably regularised by viewing habits
(for example constant low level lighting), so control over a linear
timeline for audience engagement is nearly always impossible.
Certainly it is the pursuit of this position that lies behind the recent
public “Cross-Media-Oper” C-the speed of light by European collective
Phase7. It is at once a typically Berlinesque curiosity of 360’ digital
projection technology and sensory spectacle, at the centre of which a
score by Steinhäuser—Baumhof, and libretto by Naudecker provides
parts for soprano, baritone and high-soprano to various conservative
and electronic accompaniments. The requirements made on space are
not only specialised but particularly extreme; sponsored by the
Wissenschaft im Dialog1 no less the production was staged through its
duration to coincide with the Einstein Year, 2005 in a custom
constructed media-drome. “Stereoscopic animation, video- and
software-art”, write the group “were combined with original
visualisations from international scientific institutes such as the
Hubble Space Telescope Institute” to form the main visual narrative,
which is then projected onto an 18metre high dome in 360 fulldome-
projection whilst the three protagonists, with acoustic enhancement,
are broadcast (Phase7:2005) (ex. 5(a,b,c,)).
1 Wissenschaft im Dialog (Science in Dialogue) is a leading public scientific research group which sponsors numerous projects to foster public education and research across Europe. http://www.wissenschaft-im-dialog.de/english/wid.php4?ID=5
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
]
In all embracing media, it is perhaps in this sense no less of a worthy
inheritor to Wagnerian tradition centred on the spectacle and the
sublime, than Seller’s—Viola’s piece. But in alluding to a sort of
sensory gesamkunstwerk in this way, it is not suggested that there
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
might be a prescriptive use towards a ‘total effect strategy’ upon
audiences based on this sort of model, but that the strength of
videopera in the possibility of generating discourse between these
components within this space to a degree desired. From the simplest
exchanges between visuals, sounds and drama to, as Rogala (1993) puts
it; “pushing the viewer to a point where overload with information
that should be processed… to force viewers to think about their
judgements and emotional responses to art in a technological age.”
Movement & Sculpture
In discussing space, it becomes clear that the relationship between the
staged drama and video can then be conceived in two ways,
allegorically or sculpturally; though in reality it is generally a
combination. We might prefer then to call movement a subset of
space, since it refers here to the construction of choreographed
relationships between installations and the kinetic drama of actors on
the stage, although in this context considered distinct from those
works that directly integrate feedback technologies to mediate this
relationship; (see Process and Performance.)
Movement through space is of course a predominant current explored
in video, thinking here of the performance art works of Jonas, entropic
configurations of Nauman’s Bouncing in the Corner (1968), Playing a
Note on the Violin While I Walk around the Studio (1967-68) harking
back to the living sculptures of Paik’s and Mooreman’s TV
Bra…(1969). Rather than grounded in conservative dance forms,
movement strategies have been incorporated into opera through the
performance-art route, and although not strictly operatic, the
Ex. 4 Previous Page: Three scenes from C-The speed of light, cross-media-oper by Phase7 Performing Arts (Steinhäuser—Baumhof). Berlin: 2005. Courtesy of the artists.
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Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
collaborations between Jonas and Ashley have been instructional. In
Celestial Excursions (2000) Jonas performs choreographed movements
upon a raised stage behind singers, waving a broom-like yard that
throws shadows onto a large screen to generate characters in
themselves. Their choreographed actions, and indeed Jonas’
movements are accompanied by onstage pianistic commentary on the
stories, a feature similar to Meredith Monk’s works including Atlas
and Mercy.
“Video theatre allows for an integrated visual counterpoint as the
discrete movements and narrative transitions within and between
media create an organic rhythm” (Rogalo 1993). Indeed, Rogala
(1993) employs such throughout In Nature is Leaving Us, (see ex. 6)
choosing the flexible projection form of video-wall, through which
staged “movement is possible between video channels when multiple
channels are jointly shown on adjoining videowalls”. A dance duet
glides and bows in synch with simple shots of flowers swaying in the
wind, whilst later in the work, the pair respond kinaesthetically to
Ex. 5 Above: Scene from Rogala's In Nature is Leaving Us (1993), from Rogala 1993.
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Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
video wall images with music, mainly electronic and processed sounds
employed in surround sound to become “an extension of the theatrical
gesture” (Rogala 1993).
Process and Performance
The peculiarity of Western opera—in marked contrast to video—is an
enduring anxiety towards the body. There may not much similar to
contemporary performances, except for the determinism of
impresarios to tidy away out of sight the excess of musical bodies—
those providing the mainstay of the music—to an arcane, often
subterranean world. We know when the main protagonists of the
drama are about to step out, as some sort of vespertine fog descends
over the instrumentalists, to leave only a couple of enervating
silhouettes. An aesthetic presumption made by producers arising it
seems in embarrassment towards the bourgeois consciousness of the
body as a purely functional means of aural reproduction.
A feature of the Modernist avant-garde then, in some sort of belated
apology for this state of affairs, has been the attestation of more
corporeal realisations of “music-theatre” (Cesare 2006) incorporating,
as Morgan puts it, “some aspect of dramatic action or symbolism into
what could otherwise be considered a pure concert piece” (Morgan
1991). As with any typically uncompromising gestures of the resistant
Modernists, such efforts have eloped more from a means to find
another paternalistic means to reassert the primacy of the original text
upon performers, than offering any sort of somatic concessions. As
Cesare (2006) concludes; “the inevitability of a mediated presence begs
the question of whether it might be possible for mediation to
accentuate the physical body, rather than diminish it.” Perhaps here
collusion with video can help; it is useful to turn presently to a 2005
First Published in Art Monthly Sept. 2008
Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
restaging of Maxwell-Davies’ 1969 monodrama, Eight Songs for a
Mad King.
Conceived in any case as a choreographed musical production set
within an aviary, Eight Songs dramatises the transgression of the King
(England’s George III) into Lear-ian neurosis throughout which he
exchanges recitative and soliloquy with the improvisations of his avian
colleagues (instrumentalists) through sharply contrasting, virtuosic
vocals, guttural gestures and sprechtissme. Only through these
interactions is the audience able to peer into the monarch’s psyche and
come to the irony of the piece that it is the King, not his birds, who is
incarcerated by sovereignty and neurosis; a distortion that flows right
the way down to Max’s characteristically inventive score, the
improvisatory cues of which are graphed into the structural shape of a
birdcage, at the centre of which is the tenor’s part (see ex. 6):
Ex. 6 Score to Eight Songs for a Mad King, Peter Maxwell Davies (1969)
The Critical Arts Editor for the International Contemporary
Ensemble, comments on the production thus (Cesare 2006):
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Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
“[the production] begins with [the King] Tantsits seated at the back of the
stage, behind a small video camera and partially obscured by a large video
screen (about ten by twelve feet) and behind musicians arranged, and
amplified (as is Tantsits), on scaffolding on either side of the stage. Tantsits’s
face is projected onto the screen [ex. 7], and throughout the production he
manipulates his own image as he sings, leaning into and away from the
frame, while applying thick layers of stage makeup and a powdered wig that
transform him into the public image of a sovereign… Echoing the King’s
close-up and paralleling the fragmentation of his mental state, the musicians
each have Spy Cams somewhere on their bodies or instruments: the
Ex. 7 Above: Scene from 2005 staging of Eight Songs for A Mad King, Peter Maxwell Davies (1967). Courtesy Cesare (2005)
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Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
violinist’s right hand, the neck of the cello, and the end of the clarinet. Images
are projected onto televisions, piled precariously at the left and right edges
of the stage… The immediate contradiction of live body and mediated
fragment create a perceptival discord between body and representation,
sound and image, that works in tandem with the King’s own mediated
presence.”
True, this appropriation of video may not seem unconventional at all,
for it has after all, often been in this space between a protagonist’s
exhibitionism and an audience’s voyeurism—mediated traditionally by
language, drama and music alone—that video has come into vogue.
We turn to Campus’ Three Transitions or Acconci’s interminable
experiment Pryings, in which the protagonist tries desperately,
repeatedly, ineffectively to force open his collaborators eyes. There are
earlier experiments with integrating video into opera to effect a split
in the self, thinking here of the equally neurotic ego of Acguizme’s
monodrama Salt Itinerary, whose various desultory gestures and
incantations are oft transposed into phantom anguishes on a
projection at the furthest edge of the stage. Nor either might its
allusions to documentary form, or more particularly “Emo” video-cam
culture be shocking. But to my mind the invasion of the protagonist-
self is not the challenge of this piece—though a valid route for video.
No, rather its scandale de succes is its heuristic protestation to that
most enduring affliction of operatic staging; confronting at once the
sensibilities of the disembodied aesthetics of its music, and expelling
the suppositious distinction between musicians and protagonists,
traditionally to the spurious privilege of the latter. Video might finally
cast disbelief on the turgid velleity of performers’ limitation to the
interpreting of texts and scores, and the canon that the musical must
not also be the theatrical, “the trace of the score present on every
gesture.” Its application here is necessarily small and introverted, and
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Copyright John E Bevan 2008, & Royal Holloway, University of London. All rights reserved.
perhaps only partially suggestive of potential for projection-based
application to the veritable smörgåsbord of a Covent Garden orchestra,
the spectacle of which might be as great as that of any libretto. It is in
this sense not only a highly appropriate phenomological experiment
for video, but moreover one that we can only look to video to meet,
and since it will not sit comfortably with the gerontocracy of the
operatic establishment either, it proposes a timely affirmation that the
medium of video is capable of superseding merely the satisfaction and
representation of artistic yuppiedom.
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