The intersection of live and digital: new technical classifications for digital scenography in opera (original) (raw)
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Research chronicle/Research chronicle - Royal Music Association, 2024
It is June 2022 and the premiere of R.U.R. Torrent of Light, a multimedia opera, in Toronto is enthralling audiences. Inspired by Karel Čapek's play that introduced the word 'robot' into 20th-century vocabulary, composer Nicole Lizée and librettist and playwright Nicholas Billon have conceived a science-fiction opera for our current fascination with AI (artificial intelligence). The production by Toronto's Tapestry Opera Theatre is in partnership with the research and creation of new technologies at the Social Body Lab and the Digital Futures Initiatives at Ontario College of Art & Design University. It has been conceived to embed technologies into the scenographic dramaturgy as projections, wearable art and spatialisation of sound and light through the costuming and neologisms in instrumentation to create a 'unique electronica-classical sound' of the neo-futurist worlding. After the hiatus of the last two years, this live performance highlights our growing recognition of scenographic vocabularies of programmable performance affecting behaviours, as well as expanded definitions of sound and digital integration as contemporary opera. Such interdisciplinarity has often brought the spectator into fresh relationships with opera in performance, thereby activating the event of spectatorship. Integrating film, video and currently digital scenographies has become a mode of performance dramaturgies that curate critical axes of time, space and scale as integral. As much as Čapek's play in 1920 looked to the animacy of machines, Béla Balázs had already applied his recent film theory to his libretto of Bluebeard's Castle to ghost affective camera angles on stage. Balázs's 1918 published libretto demonstrates a hybridisation with the filmic; the didascalia (stage directions) activate the events of the narrative comparable to acts of seeing through stylised camera work. In the shift from the prologue to the entrance of Bluebeard and Judith, Balázs's didascalia insist on a self-consciousness of backlighting as distinct from theatrical illumination: 'the figures of Bluebeard and Judith appear, dark against the open doorway.' 1 Subsequently, as Judith opens each door, the emphasis is on the effect rather than a reinforcement of a locational setting: 'The door opens noiselessly, making a blood-red gap in the wall, like a wound. From the opening a long streak of red light is cast across the floor.' 2 Balázs returns repeatedly to the insights of side lighting, encouraging the spectator to re-orientate the space through a 90°angle that choreographs Judith walking across the stage in profile, perpendicular to the auditorium, and along the streaks of light emanating from the doors; that is, her interaction is gesturally with the lighting, rather than Bluebeard.
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This thesis investigates artworks born at the convergence of digital media and contemporary performance, and the ways in which technology impacts the field of performance. The term digital media refers to technology that produces digitised (as opposed to analogue) content such as text, audio, video, graphics and metadata. Contemporary performance refers to artworks that combine different artistic traditions—experimental theatre and dance, video art, visual art, music composition and performance art—in a single performance event. The convergence of these two fields has produced a significant body of technological works of art that challenge and reconfigure traditional conventions in contemporary performance. This thesis examines the impact of digital media on the ways performance is created, received and experienced, and the extent to which media open up new possibilities for creative expression and may generate new art forms. I mapped the field by defining three large categories that mark the heterogeneous landscape of technologically enhanced performances today, namely multimedia theatre, telematic performance and pervasive performance. Methodologically, I combined hermeneutic methods of interpretation and reflection with academic forms of practical inquiry, combining textual analysis of relevant works from each of the three categories—such as Ghost Road (Murgia and Pauwels 2012), make-shift (Jamieson and Crutchlow 2010) and Rider Spoke (Blast Theory 2007)—with the practical development and analysis of a pervasive performance experiment titled Chain Reaction (Pérez 2009 and 2011). Theoretically, the project is interdisciplinary, bringing together performance theory, digital media studies, experimental game scholarship and experiential art documentation. In discussing the ways in which digital media impact contemporary performance, I identify a number of traditional conventions in the field of theatre and performance that are currently being challenged. These are in the areas of audience participation, use of space, actor role, rehearsal and staging, and performance documentation. Central arguments in the thesis are, on the one hand, that researchers, critics and practitioners must look beyond the visionary expressions of aesthetic potential in order to grasp the real state of technologically enhanced art forms. On the on the other hand, it is only by considering both, the horizon-pushing high-tech along with the purpose-orientated low-tech, that a more grounded understanding of the present impact of developing technology on art culture can and should be reached.
Revista latina de Comunicación Social, 2017
Introduction: This paper studies opera films of centuries XX and XXI, in order to identify whether the language used is closer to the theater standards of the performing arts typical of live or those of audiovisual media. Methodology: We have performed an exhaustive contents analysis of the end of the first act from 29 filmed versions of Mozart's Don Giovanni, according to three categories: type of film, type of camera shots used and type of editing. From these, we evaluated 41 variables. Results: We conclude that, with the purpose to expand a performance such as the operatic outside theaters, even in the XXI century, live still limits the form of films. Our paper highlights that it is not enough to transfer operatic contents to mediatic platforms, but making the most of the audiovisual language to generate narrative sense is also needed. We suggest several ways to do so.
Editorial: Ancient Theatre in Performance: Contemporary Electronic Initiatives
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This Editorial to Volume 6, Issue 2 of Didaskalia: Ancient Theater Today (Summer 2005), reviews contemporary electronic initiatives “that are rapidly changing how we study ancient theatre in performance, and indeed how we create new antiquity-related artworks and events”. It introduces contributions by: Mark Childs on the ARCHES Project; Lorna Hardwick on the Open University's Reception of the Texts and Images of Ancient Greece project; Platon Mavromoustakos and Gregory Ioannides on the European Network of Research and Documentation of Performances of Ancient Greek Drama and its database; Amanda Wrigley on the Database of Modern Performances of Ancient Drama at the University of Oxford; Carl Mueller on the Perseus Digital Library; Tom Donegan on the Lysistrata Project and the digital publication strategy of playwright Charles (‘Chuck´) Mee; Drew Baker and Martin Blazeby on their 3-D digital visualisations of the Theatre of Pompey in Rome and of the visual evidence for Roman temporary stages; Richard Beacham and Peter Eversman on the Theatron Project, “containing extensive information and real-time navigable 3D digital reconstructions” of historic theatre spaces; Craig Morrison and Monty McKeand on electronic learning resources for teachers and students of Ancient Greek Theatre; Tom Hines on his creation of virtual tours of historical theatres using photographic panoramas. The Editorial concludes with a discussion of “Visualisation and Performance Documentation”, an abridged and adapted version of Denard’s 2004 article, “Performing the Past: The Virtual Revolution in Performance History”, in which he argues that 3D digital simulations represent a significant departure in performance documentation, in contrast to text, depictions or recordings, because they give user-readers a direct, sensory experience of those elements of performance—space, time, sound, lighting, scenography and movement—that are experienced, directly and sensorily, by an audience.