video in opera: a response

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



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.



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



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



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.



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



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.



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



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



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



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



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



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.



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



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.



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.



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



]

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



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.



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.



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



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):



“[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)



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



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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video in opera: a response

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