Digital Scenography In Opera In The Twenty First Century

Digital Scenography in Opera in the Twenty-First Century is the first definitive study of the use of digital scenography in Western opera production. The book begins by exploring digital scenography’s dramaturgical possibilities and establishes a critical framework for identifying and comparing the use of digital scenography across different digitally enhanced opera productions. The book then investigates the impacts and potential disruptions of digital scenography on opera’s longstanding production conventions, both on and off the stage. Drawing on interviews with major industry practitioners, including Paul Barritt, Mark Grimmer, Donald Holder, Elaine J. McCarthy, Luke Halls, Wendall K. Harrington, Finn Ross, S. Katy Tucker, and Victoria ‘Vita’ Tzykun, author Caitlin Vincent identifies key correlations between the use of digital scenography in practice and subsequent impacts on creative hierarchies, production design processes, and organisational management. The book features detailed case studies of digitally enhanced productions premiered by Dutch National Opera, Komische Oper Berlin, Opéra de Lyon, The Royal Opera, Covent Garden, San Francisco Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, The Metropolitan Opera, Victorian Opera, and Washington National Opera.

This book addresses the neglect of visual creativities and content, and how these are commercialised in the music industries. While musical and visual creativities drive growth, there is a lack of literature relating to the visual side of the music business, which is significant given that the production of meaning and value within this business occurs across a number of textual sites. Popular music is a multimedia, discursive, fluid, and expansive cultural form that, in addition to the music itself, includes album covers; gig and tour posters; music videos; set, stage, and lighting designs; live concert footage; websites; virtual reality/augmented reality technologies; merchandise designs; and other forms of visual content. As a result, it has become impossible to understand the meaning and value of music without considering its relation to these visual components and to the interrelationships between them. Using design culture theory, participant observation, interviews, case studies, and a visual methodology to explore the topic, this research-based book is a valuable study aid for undergraduate and postgraduate students of subjects including the music business, design, arts management, creative and cultural industries studies, business and management studies, and media and communications.

Claudio Monteverdi’s Venetian Operas features chapters by a group of scholars and performers of varied backgrounds and specialties, who confront the various questions raised by Monteverdi’s late operas from an interdisciplinary perspective. The premise of the volume is the idea that constructive dialogue between musicologists and musicians, stage directors and theater historians, as well as philologists and literary critics can shed new light on Monteverdi’s two Venetian operas (and their respective librettos, by Badoaro and Busenello), not only at the levels of textual criticism, historical exegesis, and dramaturgy, but also with regard to concrete choices of performance, staging, and mise-en-scène. Following an Introduction setting up the interdisciplinary agenda, the volume comprises two main parts: ‘Contexts and Sources’ deals with the historical, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts of the works - librettos and scores; 'Performance and Interpretation’ offers critical and historical insights regarding the casting, singing, reciting, staging, and conducting of the two operas. This volume will appeal to scholars and researchers in Opera Studies and Music History as well as be of interest to early music performers and all those involved with presenting opera on stage.

In recent years, interest in Rameau’s operas has grown enormously. These works are no longer regarded as peripheral by performers and audiences but are increasingly staged in the world’s major opera houses and festivals, while the production of first-rate recordings on CD and DVD continues to flourish. Such welcome developments have gone hand in hand with an upsurge in research on Rameau and his period. The present volume, devoted solely to the composer’s operas, reflects this scholarly activity. It brings together a substantial group of essays by an international team of scholars on a wide range of aspects of Rameau’s operas. The individual essays are informed by a variety of disciplines or sub-disciplines including literature, archival studies, musical analysis, gender studies, ballet and choreography, dramaturgy and staging. The contents are addressed to a wide readership, including not only scholars but also practical musicians, stage directors, dancers and choreographers.

The Original Portrayal of Mozart’s Don Giovanni offers an original reading of Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s opera Don Giovanni, using as a lens the portrayal of the title role by its creator, the baritone Luigi Bassi (1766–1825). Although Bassi was coached in the role by the composer himself, his portrayal has never been studied in depth before, and this book presents a large number of new sources (first- and second-hand accounts), which allows us to reconstruct his performance scene by scene. The book confronts Bassi’s portrayal with a study of the opera’s early German reception and performance history, demonstrating how Don Giovanni as we know it today was not only created by Mozart, Da Ponte and Luigi Bassi but also by the early German adapters, translators, critics and performers who turned the title character into the arrogant and violent villain we still encounter in most of today’s stage productions. Incorporating discussion of dramaturgical thinking of the late Enlightenment and the difficult moral problems that the opera raises, this is an important study for scholars and researchers from opera studies, theatre and performance studies, music history as well as conductors, directors and singers.

This book theorizes auteur Robert Lepage’s scenography-based approach to adapting canonical texts. Lepage’s technique is defined here as ‘scenographic dramaturgy’, a process and product that de-privileges dramatic text and relies instead on evocative, visual performance and intercultural collaboration to re-envision extant plays and operas. Following a detailed analysis of Lepage’s adaptive process and its place in the continuum of scenic writing and auteur theatre, this book features four case studies charting the role of Lepage’s scenographic dramaturgy in re-‘writing’ extant texts, including Shakespeare’s Tempest on Huron-Wendat territory, Stravinsky’s Nightingale in a twenty-seven ton pool, and Wagner’s Ring cycle via the infamous, sixteen-million-dollar Metropolitan Opera production. The final case study offers the first interrogation of Lepage’s twenty-first century ‘auto-adaptations’ of his own seminal texts, The Dragons’ Trilogy and Needles & Opium. Though aimed at academic readers, this book will also appeal to practitioners given its focus on performance-making, adaptation and intercultural collaboration.

"From the early days of radio broadcast to today's recorded simulcasts and live online productions, opera houses have embraced technology as a way to reach new audiences. But how do these new forms of remediated opera extend, amplify, or undermine production values, and what does the audience gain or lose in the process? In Screening the Operatic Stage, Christopher Morris critically examines the cultural implications of opera's engagement with screen media. Foregrounding a playful exchange and self-awareness between stage and screen, Screening the Operatic Stage analyzes how opera sees itself on video. Morris uses the conceptual tools of media theory to understand the historical and contemporary screen cultures that have transmitted the opera house into living rooms, onto desktops and portable devices, and across networks of movie theaters. These screen cultures reveal how inherently "technological" opera is as a medium, begging the question of whether it can be understood independently of technology. Ultimately, Screening the Operatic Stage shows how the technologies of televisual representation employed in opera reinforce its audience's expectations for the genre"--

This book explores the interplay between performing arts, intangible cultural heritage and digital environments through a compendium of essays on emerging practices and case studies, as well as critical, historical and theoretical perspectives. It features essays that engage with varied forms of intangible cultural heritage, from music and storytelling to dance, theatre and martial arts. Cases of digital technology interventions are provided from different geographical and cultural settings, from Europe to Asia and the Americas. Together, the collection reflects on the implications that digital interventions have on intangible cultural heritage engagements, its curation and transmission in diverse localities. The volume is a valuable resource for discovering the multiple ways in which cultural heritage is mediated through digital technologies, and engages with audiences, artists, users and researchers.