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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2016
Scene - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2016
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2016
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Poppea in space: The influence of theatre architecture on recent productions of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
By Gregory CampAbstractThe architecture of opera houses and the disposition of their internal space plays an important role in audience response, a role hitherto neglected in opera studies in favour of abstracted sonic aspects. This article is an examination of the spaces in which three very different professional European productions of Claudio Monteverdi’s 1643 opera L’incoronazione di Poppea took place, seen within a few months of each other in 2010: Pier Luigi Pizzi’s production at the Teatro Real in Madrid; Robert Carsen’s at Glyndebourne; and Dietrich Hilsdorf’s at the Cologne Opera. I first explore the relation of the audience to the stage due to the presence or absence of a proscenium arch. Both Glyndebourne and Madrid’s Teatro Real are proscenium theatres, though the Madrid production attempted to erase the proscenium through the layout of the stage and the orchestra. The Cologne production was held not in a purpose-built theatre but in the central hall of a former corporate headquarters, a proscenium-less space with the audience seated on two sides of a traverse stage. These layouts had different effects on the performances and on the audience’s response to them, affording different opportunities to their directors and different processes of audience engagement. I then compare the present-day audience’s spatial experience of this opera with the way its seventeenth-century audiences may have experienced it, arguing that the changes in theatre architecture over the centuries have a significant (and overlooked) impact on our results in creating historically informed operatic performances. This examination of the affordances offered by space open up the genre of opera to a wider potential range of musicological and sociological research.
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A trip to Qiuzhuang to see Li Mu’s Qiuzhuang Project
By Ellen ZweigAbstractLi Mu, a Chinese visual artist, created a special project in his hometown, a small remote village in China. He recreated ten western artworks, placing them in his childhood context in order to re-establish a relationship with the relatives and neighbours who he left behind when he moved to the city. Ellen Zweig was the first foreigner to visit this village, to see Li Mu’s project. She describes her trip and argues that Li Mu’s project is not ‘cultural colonialism’, but rather a life/art project.
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Lady Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes Renewed: Art gallery performance project
More LessAbstractWhat happens when a contemporary, live art performance is designed and staged for a Renaissance building that is an international tourist attraction in its own right, and displays an outstanding fine art collection in its rooms and corridors? In 2014 I helped to create a theatre performance at The Queen’s House art gallery in Greenwich and in so doing attempted something fairly radical for a museum setting. Lady Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes Renewed was a collaboration between Akleriah, a visually experimental performance collective, myself as a theatre director and film-maker Jason Wen. The iconic Emma Hamilton was arguably the first female performance artist and the piece was commissioned to tie in with a display of eighteenth-century engravings and paintings in which she features. The flamboyant costume design and choreographic nature of Akleriah’s work instigates immediate audience attention in non-theatre spaces but the art gallery setting for this performance made additional demands. This article considers the negotiation of that space as a venue, navigates the production process from conception to realization, and asks if and how the expectations of the gallery Programmer, and the 350 viewers who saw the piece, were met. The research and rehearsal period is critiqued to track the re-imagining of actual historical characters with an inventive contemporary lens, using intersection between live and filmed images, and fragments of text. The semilit location of the performance, its relationship to the pictures on the walls and the recurring frequency of the fifteen minutes duration are key issues. An outcome of the event notices how the close proximity and presence of the semi-transitory audience needed a particular theatrical complicity, a trust within the space. The film projection enhanced the fluidity of the piece, with its shifts in reality and perspective. Feedback included ‘ghostlike ... beautiful ... intriguing’, bringing alive characters and space.
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The eye of Persepolis’ tiger: How melancholy and nostalgia resonate through Satrapi’s animated film
Authors: Eleftheria Rania Kosmidou and Kate CorbinAbstractWill Eisner coined the term sequential art to refer to comic strips/books and graphic novels, while arguing that this distinct discipline not only has much in common with film-making but it is in fact a forerunner to film-making. Sequential art is a powerful form of popular culture. However, the scholarly community has generally ignored this popular form of art. This article discusses the animated film Persepolis (Paronnaud and Satrapi, 2007) and explores the ways in which animation is used. We analyse this film in terms of the cultural memory discourse and suggest that this film not only creates a melancholic cultural memory of the past it negotiates, but also, paradoxically, it generates a nostalgic one. As we shall argue, the film’s inherent melancholy and nostalgia allegorically communicate a quest for identity in our present-day societies.
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Cathedral without a city: Using sound to create imagined spaces in Kurt Fitzpatrick’s Cathedral City
By Rick CousinsAbstractA one-person show which tours the fringe festival circuit presents a special set of challenges for delineating and concretizing the places described in its narrative. The dimensions, layout and other characteristics of the spaces where such a show is performed can vary markedly. As is common practice with one-person fringe shows, Kurt Fitzpatrick’s Cathedral City has only one visible staging element – a chair borrowed at the performance site. However, Cathedral City’s action often travels to places which are too numinous to be brought to life through onstage dialogue and gestures alone. Not only that, but these places straddle the border between real life and fiction, where the orderly logic of the waking world intermingles with the chaotic sensory mosaic of dreams. In place of scenic design, sound was used to conjure up the ever-changing worlds of Cathedral City. The show’s sound designer describes the ways that he employed soundscapes, music, and individual sonic effects to give the audience as clear an idea as possible of where Kurt’s stream of consciousness had taken them to, while still keeping them guessing about where it would take them next.
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The sonorous void: Acoustic stages and sound play in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros
By Vlad DimaAbstractAmong the many conflicts pervading Eugene Ionesco’s influential play Rhinoceros (1961) one stands out as a dominant means to spring the story forward. It is not a subtle dramatic device, and yet it has not gotten much attention from critics and theorists. In this particular play, more so than elsewhere in Ionesco’s oeuvre and in the theatre of the absurd in general, there is an insistence on creating a conflict between what one sees, hears and imagines. Several oscillations and leaps that occur between exterior and interior spaces highlight this narrative conflict. The sounds and noises specified by the didascalia help the reader navigate the story while occasionally and playfully taking the reader completely out of the diegetic space. New, imaginary acoustic spaces and stages emerge and fill the void around the actual stage, as at the centre of it all the main character, Bérenger, functions as a kind of aural shape-shifter, capable of moving between different levels of interiority and exteriority through sound. The purpose of this article then is to explore the role of sound and sound directions in Rhinoceros and to establish that a new type of space – an imaginary acoustic space – is created. The article also indexes the elements of play and playfulness that help generate a variety of diegetical and extradiegetical spaces, from among which the aural component emerges as a crucial means to support the narrative.
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Critical costume
Authors: Rachel Hann and Sidsel Bech
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