Les enfants terribles, Belgrade 2009
photo: Đorđe Tomić
Showing posts with label english. Show all posts
Showing posts with label english. Show all posts
No Way Out of the Labyrinth
Was it a thriller? A hopeless love story? A melodrama?
Is it about aliens, or dead men, or vampires, or lovers, or a fantasy. Or is it a dream, or a cinema experiment, or the myth of Orpheus, or about the way we remember things, or just "about a persuasion"
… or a pop video?
Is it about aliens, or dead men, or vampires, or lovers, or a fantasy. Or is it a dream, or a cinema experiment, or the myth of Orpheus, or about the way we remember things, or just "about a persuasion"
… or a pop video?
On Film, Performing, and Theatre
L’Année dernière à Solitude is an experimental theatre project that appropriates some strategies, techniques, and/or glamour of the iconic film of European modernism L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Resnais/Robbe-Grillet). The project consists of two parts – the spatial installation Traces that deals mostly with the visual, or better, material traces from the film - and Couloirs, a performance that focuses on the dramaturgical discourse of the film. The project can be seen as a discussion on deceiving and unstable, unverifiable nature of memory; the significance of meaning or communication in an artwork; or perhaps as a political discussion on parasitizing (and its implications) on the film that caused hermeneutical controversies in the film establishments for four decades. But it is also an intimate puzzle on the emotional dimension of s/Solitude.
The reconstruction of the film was executed in such a manner that the procedures of the director, scriptwriter, cinematographer, editor, set and costume designer, etc. were treated as artifacts, elements from which the new visuality or performativity is drawn. The film is torn to its constituent elements, that are then ‘set’ in the conditions where each of them ‘performs’ – but in such a way that the viewers are not merely observers or witnesses, but participants, with the film ‘happening’ to them. As the film itself, this project is also, in almost every segment, ambivalent. Did we meet last year at Marienbad? Did we meet at all? Is this a theatre project if it starts with an exhibition and ends with film screening? Does it contain live performance, or are the voices that deliver the text in English twenty minutes after the beginning of the screening and completely disappear towards the end, merely a sonic trompe-l’oeil?
On Traces of Memory
In the core of this reconstruction is the dilemma of memory and remembering. Splitting the project into two parts, in the first part in the gallery conditions, we display traces of the film as artifacts, traces of events from the film, that is events that definitely happened. A broken shoe, a broken glass, the leisure game NIM, garden-riddle from the film with its surrealistic shadows, and finally the very confusion about the place of the events materialized in five identical maps of a single baroque labyrinth garden named with five different toponyms mentioned in the film. By offering shredded information about the film and letting the audience to explore, without any instructions, we intend to artificially create memory of an event, to be activated one day later, during the film screening/Couloirs. At a moment some situations from the exhibition appears in the film, the audience activates its memory and thereby it is included in the film itself. Finally, one of the monologues in the Couloirs’ script, executed as Robbe-Grillet’s shots descriptions/instructions from the novel-script, directly describes the previous evening’s gallery situation. In that way, viewing the film formalizes memory, l’année dernière (last year) in the film, relates to the viewer’s yesterday.
On Corridors (Couloirs) of the Labyrinth
The text performed in Couloirs is comprised of three different discourses: dialogues (from the film), shots descriptions, and interpretation. The original dialogue from the film is stripped down to its basic features. It is spoken by the actress. Shots descriptions are simulations of Robbe-Grillet’s novel-script, and are delivered by the visual artist. Interpretation, a Frankenstein-like text composed of viewer’s comments taken from various sources, in which more attention is paid to semiotics rather than semantics – is spoken by the theatre director. All three of these discourses try to ‘co-exist’ within the film screening – sometimes as dubbing, sometimes as commentary, sometimes seamlessly, sometimes conspicuously. Nevertheless, each of these three texts diverges in its own way, distances itself from film interpretation. Furthermore, the texts perpetuate the controversy about the meaning, as if the hermetics of the work are tripled and further reflected as in an endless line of mirrors. In a way, these three texts are close to the nouvelle roman strategy: they offer descriptions of things (film) from as many points of view possible, but without interpretation.
The film projection on three transparent screens is endlessly multiplied on walls and floor of the venue. In that labyrinth of light and shadow, like phantoms, the voices and decentered, almost hidden figures of authors/performers appear. Discrete parasitism, like some kind of performers’ resignation… An exegesis of this film text was never the intention of the authors. The strategy that was adopted is one of uncritical ‘adoration’, and a literal attempt to enter the film by the audience as well as the authors.
Coming back to Solitude after a year they weren’t able to recognize themselves. Were they here l’anée dernière, or was it in Marienbad or somewhere else? Or was it us?
Bojan Djordjev
The Autopsy of the Oper(rrr)a
Ivana Stamatović
A little bit more than 150 years ago Richard Wagner identified (operatic) music with a female body: Music is a woman… She is a siren, which without a soul floats on the waves of her see until man’s love gives her a soul. Today, when we set equivalences between femininity and opera, we don’t do that, it goes without saying, on the level of female/operatic body’s ‘biology’, but ‘beyond’ it. We talk about the relatedness between the ways in which a woman on opera stage and opera itself were conceptualized in surrounding dominant cultures. Because, opera – as well as a woman – does not exist! We know that opera hasn’t got a soul, but that she represents a construct and fiction which truly floats at sees of aesthetic-artistic unintentional or intentional historic encounters; that opera is an object of love and hate and a subject to multiple resurrections and funerals, fetishism and destruction, but, at the same time, an object which, conventionally speaking, is essential. What is, than, the mutual impossible female/operatic history?
In the first authentic opera Monteverdi’s Orpheus turned and, because of the one impatient and premature look, lost his adoring woman forever. In that moment he incautiously and, seems like, equally irretrievably emptied the site of an opera devotee’s desire. In that way, the impossible history of a woman in opera began: bodyless soul of the invisible and ungraspable Euridice – mediated by the female voice on opera stage – wandered the whirlpools of opera metaphysics and, inscribing and reinscribing the trace of the Other’s desire in them, evaded the embodyment of the listeners/viewers’ jouissance. For the reason that, if Adorno was right when he said that all opera is Orpheus, then – at least for about three centuries after the creation of this Monteverdi’s work – all women on stage have been, in a sense, Euridice: projection of the Other, at the same time an object of desire and object of fear, (pre)determined by the indisputable higher (heavenly) order.
A little bit less than three hundred years later, Bizet’s Hose reached the edge of patience with witch the mortal human being can wait on love to come about and, determined to destroy that unreachable female – more than the female herself – for which he strongly yearned for a long time, took the beloved Carmen’s life with the knife blade. However, as soon as the first drop of flaming blood from the Carmen’s ripped body – under the stage lights and in front of all penguins in uniforms – disappeared in the boards of Opéra-Comique (what an irony!), it was clear that Hose’s intention was frustrated from the very beginning: his target became even more dangerous. Carmen’s dead body – like a material evidence of the woman’s impossible presence on stage, from that time on forever literally nailed to the boards of the opera house – and her last piercing scream – like an undestroyable medium of her body, since than inerasably inscribed in operatic discourse – decisively announced the sunrise of a new postmetaphysical operatic (but not only operatic) age without God; age in which the interaction of souls brought about by voice is replaced by interaction… within a flux of forces that determine and dissolve bodies; age which is not founded on the invisible soul and its myths, but the subject’s embodiment of its most basic, forceful drives. In that way, on the music stage finally culminated love returned to nature, as Nietzsche shouted deliriously. That kind of love, after it had been liberated from the initial veil of sentimentality, transcendence and mythology, stirred up sweet juices of passion in the living empirical bodies both in opera and in the body of the opera itself.
Euridice, clearly, was not the first (empirical) woman on the boards of the opera theatre, same as Carmen was not the last, but these two heroines, nevertheless, in the best way symbolize two extreme ontological moments connected to the biography of the woman on opera stage: birth and death. That is to say, that Monteverdi’s heroin was the first (and only) women which was supposed to be given a gift of (new) life on the stage itself. Orpheus cheered up underground gods with his music, although – it will turn out – not that he would bring back his loving woman for real: Euridice was brought to life only to take the sacrifice of his weakness. Having done so, she was constituted as the missing element around which the ideal of the comforting order of the unified world was built.
Bizet’s Carmen, on the other hand, was the first (but not the only) woman whose life was taken under the spotlights. Hose stabbed Carmen’s body with the knife, because his stake was to high: ruptured between many centuries burden of the idealistic promise and the defeating discovery of the inability of its fulfillment, Hose literally and brutally cut into the organism of his betrayed yearning. Carmen’s body was left to lie on the sqaure in Seville, on the mercy of the most diverse. Moral loudspeakers quickly immersed it in the formaldehyde solution and saved it as a relic of the great tradition. On the other hand, greedy lustful personas continued to cut it in pieces until it was reduced to fragments and traces of the former great female seducer. Post festum, it looks like Euridice was expelled from the ‘real’ opera world and pushed into its metaphysics so that later she could reincarnate in the sinful Carmen, then die again and be reborn in some other body or, even, a part of the body… And again, and again.
If we would, instead of the two female protagonists, for the lead role of this story name opera itself, than we would get one of the most provocative biographies of this genre. Because, between the fate of a woman on opera stage and the fate of opera there is an interesting parallel, we could say, even, equivalence. On one hand, in spite of the certainty of its historical beginning in the circle of the Florentin renaissance intellectuals, opera’s ‘birth’ was – similar to Euridice’s return from the underworld - burdened by her uncertain and ungrateful service to metaphysics: a (new) life was given to opera with the hope that the most important classical dramatic form will be reincarnated in it. Consequently, the history of opera – or, more precisely, of its ‘first’ life – is an impossible history of the regeneration of the unreachable and completely unrepresentable ideal of Greek tragedy; ideal which has – always evading the embodyment (would it, in spite of the term’s unrefinedness, be more correct to say ‘theatralizing’) – been leaving its unsure and seductive traces in numerous musical and theatrical rethinkings of the relations between the operatic texts, with the view of reaching the one, unified and coherent artwork. On the other hand, that kind of opera has been ‘murdered’ under the stage lights more than once, but it is neither possible nor necessary to determine the moment of its ‘death’ precisely. Puccini’s Turandot, Schöenberg’s Erwartung, Berg’s Lulu, Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, Cage’s Europeras… These and other works have been, in different occasions in the 20th century philosophy of opera, identified as the ones with which the death of the ‘traditional’ opera has been proclaimed. The blade of their knife penetrated several vital parts of the great operatic history: logic of operatic narration, mimetic relationship between music on one side, and words and scenic view on the other, synthesis of opera’s constitutive arts, the boundaries of its media and, finally, its performtive and perceptive potentials; in other words, the opera’s body itself, which was – like Carmen’s – tortured with many centuries long wish for the Other. Similarly to the (empirical) female body as its own conditio sine qua non, the operatic body has had two fates after each of its ‘deaths’. It has been either carefully conserved – in service to the constant human need for the art which can never be irrational enough – or cold-bloodedly, insensitively and perversely enjoyably dissected, dissolved, destroyed and deconstructed, so that after it would – fortunately for the music theatre – keep coming back even stronger, as the ghostly appearance, in new and different contexts.
***
One more theoretical and empirical vampire-like revival of female/operatic body is presented with the theatre work Operrrra (is feminine). However, Operrrra’s opera-like feature is not obvious and direct. It is established on a metalevel by means of fourway director-composers authorial dispute with all of the opera’s vital points mentioned above. In that way, through director’s decision alone, three mutually very diverse composers’ achievements have been extracted from the institutional boundaries of musical practice and placed in the theatrically conducted interrelation. It is based on the web of discontinuities: each act is written by a different author and each is differently scored and performed by distinct performers; each act has its own scenic realization and, in the most general way, theme. That web was functionalized as Operrrra’s theoretical and practical platform for mapping the discursive space and potential of the voice in the reincarnated heterogeneous opera-like/opera/female bodies and traces of those bodies. For, people who have as little reason to sing [on the scene], as they have opportunity are operatic differentia specifica in the comparison to other drama and music-theatrical genres. If the voice on stage, on the top of everything, is female and high, then the opera-like feature of the opera is guaranteed: the coloratura is no mere form of outward exaggeration, but precisely in it the idea of opera emerges most purely as an extreme.
Female voice on opera stage is the fascinating ambivalent element that arouses in the listener a potent experience of a metaphysics as well as of a physics, of an immaterial as well as of a material world. Truly, the voice has been a medium of (Euridice’s) soul and, at the same time, a medium of the (Carmen’s) body; the cause of one’s unquenchable yearning and also one’s fears; a centering of the vocal game of desire, jouissance and unconditional surrender to a phantasmagoric fascination that is always doomed to failure. The voice is a mediator between the interior and the exterior of the body: from a complex interrelation between the anatomy and socialization of the female body and, consequently, the anatomy and socialization of the female voice, numerous myths of vocal (feminine) gender emerged. They include concepts such as nature, materiality, emotions and irrationality. Finally, as the phenomenon most directly associated with the body, the voice also connotes female sexuality: like the body, from which it emanates, the female voice is considered both a signifier of sexual otherness and a source of sexual power.
Therefore, woman’s singing on stage is not only – as Adorno said – the language of passion and an expression that nature prevails in man against all convention and mediation. It is the passion itself, genuine, pure, disarming and arming. While singing, the female body is more active than while speaking; it searches for and encourages the activity of other (scenic or listening/gazing) bodies in action. Consequently, the singing voice has a power to speak to the audience both through the opera’s musical and literary text and ‘beyond’ them. Among many different ways in which opera can do so, Operrrra directly and critically refers to three. Firstly, the voice of a woman on stage can autonomize itself from verbal meanings of the text sung and it can transform itself into vocal object radically purified from all signifying elements; it can – like Lacanian object /a/ – manipulate listeners’ desire while uncovering mechanisms of its work. Secondly, the female voice has an opportunity to redefine the problem of authorial subject of the music sung; identifying itself with a desire of the woman herself, it can renounce masculinistic mimesis of female speech and come closer to the musical (performing) écriture féminine. Thirdly, the female voice has a power of selfreflexion within an extension of or opening the parts of the operatic body towards popular culture.
Lively and resonant body is a ‘natural’ source of those powers of the female voice on opera stage. It is not any body, but a very distinctive one. For, in spite of exclusive status of the vocal operatic medium, in opera productions almost equal attention is payed to the spectacularization of the body; on the stage there is a woman: her ‘inner self’ is uncovered through her voice and her ‘external self’ is usually lighted and emphasized by means of scenographic and costimographic effects. In that way, actually, representation of a woman in opera unfolds within double layered, acoustic-visual field. It is constituted through intersection, mutual permeating and opposition of the relation ear-listening-female voice and ear-gaze-female body; in other words, by way of permanent and unpredictable oscillation between position subject-object both on the stage and off of it.
Disregarding the way the dynamics within individual listening and gazing contexts as well as between them is established, a woman – in the utmost case – appears on stage for the Other; he paid so that he could, hidden in darkness of the hall, secretly enjoy the outcomes of the empirical female and constructed operatic body. But, what happens if that relationship in opera is set vice versa? More concretely, what are the consequences on the ‘protocols of jouissance’ in the Operrrra’s opera-like features when the light form the stage spotlights the audience? When the guarantee of a visual unrepresentability is revoked from the opera devotees? When the desired female body on stage dissolves simultaneously with the operatic body? When the cold surface of the screen offers a fragment of a woman? Her shadow? Reflection? Trace? Could women be regarded as opera’s jewels then, as Catherine Clément wrote a long time ago? Do the powers of the female voice change in those conditions and in what way? Whose medium is that voice and whom does it speak to? Has it got a listener at all or do we submit to it with hope of reaching metaphysics on its wings, metaphysics from which we began the autopsy of the Oper(rrr)a? Or, in other words – to paraphrase Adorno at the end – the female operatic voice itself can never be irrational enough so that we could renounce it, and in spite of that renunciation, save our soul?
* This text was written in a form of a latent dialog with writers whose texts have – in higher or lesser degree, affirmatively or negatively – influenced theoretical, aesthetic and philosophical grounds of the project Operrrra (is feminine): with Carolyn Abbate, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Catherine Clément, Mladen Dolar, Jacques Lacan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Poizat, Kaja Silverman, Miško Šuvaković, Gary Tomlinson, Slavoj Žižek and Richard Wagner. Quotations form their works and key concepts of their theories, which were used in this text, are typed in italics.
A little bit more than 150 years ago Richard Wagner identified (operatic) music with a female body: Music is a woman… She is a siren, which without a soul floats on the waves of her see until man’s love gives her a soul. Today, when we set equivalences between femininity and opera, we don’t do that, it goes without saying, on the level of female/operatic body’s ‘biology’, but ‘beyond’ it. We talk about the relatedness between the ways in which a woman on opera stage and opera itself were conceptualized in surrounding dominant cultures. Because, opera – as well as a woman – does not exist! We know that opera hasn’t got a soul, but that she represents a construct and fiction which truly floats at sees of aesthetic-artistic unintentional or intentional historic encounters; that opera is an object of love and hate and a subject to multiple resurrections and funerals, fetishism and destruction, but, at the same time, an object which, conventionally speaking, is essential. What is, than, the mutual impossible female/operatic history?
In the first authentic opera Monteverdi’s Orpheus turned and, because of the one impatient and premature look, lost his adoring woman forever. In that moment he incautiously and, seems like, equally irretrievably emptied the site of an opera devotee’s desire. In that way, the impossible history of a woman in opera began: bodyless soul of the invisible and ungraspable Euridice – mediated by the female voice on opera stage – wandered the whirlpools of opera metaphysics and, inscribing and reinscribing the trace of the Other’s desire in them, evaded the embodyment of the listeners/viewers’ jouissance. For the reason that, if Adorno was right when he said that all opera is Orpheus, then – at least for about three centuries after the creation of this Monteverdi’s work – all women on stage have been, in a sense, Euridice: projection of the Other, at the same time an object of desire and object of fear, (pre)determined by the indisputable higher (heavenly) order.
A little bit less than three hundred years later, Bizet’s Hose reached the edge of patience with witch the mortal human being can wait on love to come about and, determined to destroy that unreachable female – more than the female herself – for which he strongly yearned for a long time, took the beloved Carmen’s life with the knife blade. However, as soon as the first drop of flaming blood from the Carmen’s ripped body – under the stage lights and in front of all penguins in uniforms – disappeared in the boards of Opéra-Comique (what an irony!), it was clear that Hose’s intention was frustrated from the very beginning: his target became even more dangerous. Carmen’s dead body – like a material evidence of the woman’s impossible presence on stage, from that time on forever literally nailed to the boards of the opera house – and her last piercing scream – like an undestroyable medium of her body, since than inerasably inscribed in operatic discourse – decisively announced the sunrise of a new postmetaphysical operatic (but not only operatic) age without God; age in which the interaction of souls brought about by voice is replaced by interaction… within a flux of forces that determine and dissolve bodies; age which is not founded on the invisible soul and its myths, but the subject’s embodiment of its most basic, forceful drives. In that way, on the music stage finally culminated love returned to nature, as Nietzsche shouted deliriously. That kind of love, after it had been liberated from the initial veil of sentimentality, transcendence and mythology, stirred up sweet juices of passion in the living empirical bodies both in opera and in the body of the opera itself.
Euridice, clearly, was not the first (empirical) woman on the boards of the opera theatre, same as Carmen was not the last, but these two heroines, nevertheless, in the best way symbolize two extreme ontological moments connected to the biography of the woman on opera stage: birth and death. That is to say, that Monteverdi’s heroin was the first (and only) women which was supposed to be given a gift of (new) life on the stage itself. Orpheus cheered up underground gods with his music, although – it will turn out – not that he would bring back his loving woman for real: Euridice was brought to life only to take the sacrifice of his weakness. Having done so, she was constituted as the missing element around which the ideal of the comforting order of the unified world was built.
Bizet’s Carmen, on the other hand, was the first (but not the only) woman whose life was taken under the spotlights. Hose stabbed Carmen’s body with the knife, because his stake was to high: ruptured between many centuries burden of the idealistic promise and the defeating discovery of the inability of its fulfillment, Hose literally and brutally cut into the organism of his betrayed yearning. Carmen’s body was left to lie on the sqaure in Seville, on the mercy of the most diverse. Moral loudspeakers quickly immersed it in the formaldehyde solution and saved it as a relic of the great tradition. On the other hand, greedy lustful personas continued to cut it in pieces until it was reduced to fragments and traces of the former great female seducer. Post festum, it looks like Euridice was expelled from the ‘real’ opera world and pushed into its metaphysics so that later she could reincarnate in the sinful Carmen, then die again and be reborn in some other body or, even, a part of the body… And again, and again.
If we would, instead of the two female protagonists, for the lead role of this story name opera itself, than we would get one of the most provocative biographies of this genre. Because, between the fate of a woman on opera stage and the fate of opera there is an interesting parallel, we could say, even, equivalence. On one hand, in spite of the certainty of its historical beginning in the circle of the Florentin renaissance intellectuals, opera’s ‘birth’ was – similar to Euridice’s return from the underworld - burdened by her uncertain and ungrateful service to metaphysics: a (new) life was given to opera with the hope that the most important classical dramatic form will be reincarnated in it. Consequently, the history of opera – or, more precisely, of its ‘first’ life – is an impossible history of the regeneration of the unreachable and completely unrepresentable ideal of Greek tragedy; ideal which has – always evading the embodyment (would it, in spite of the term’s unrefinedness, be more correct to say ‘theatralizing’) – been leaving its unsure and seductive traces in numerous musical and theatrical rethinkings of the relations between the operatic texts, with the view of reaching the one, unified and coherent artwork. On the other hand, that kind of opera has been ‘murdered’ under the stage lights more than once, but it is neither possible nor necessary to determine the moment of its ‘death’ precisely. Puccini’s Turandot, Schöenberg’s Erwartung, Berg’s Lulu, Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, Cage’s Europeras… These and other works have been, in different occasions in the 20th century philosophy of opera, identified as the ones with which the death of the ‘traditional’ opera has been proclaimed. The blade of their knife penetrated several vital parts of the great operatic history: logic of operatic narration, mimetic relationship between music on one side, and words and scenic view on the other, synthesis of opera’s constitutive arts, the boundaries of its media and, finally, its performtive and perceptive potentials; in other words, the opera’s body itself, which was – like Carmen’s – tortured with many centuries long wish for the Other. Similarly to the (empirical) female body as its own conditio sine qua non, the operatic body has had two fates after each of its ‘deaths’. It has been either carefully conserved – in service to the constant human need for the art which can never be irrational enough – or cold-bloodedly, insensitively and perversely enjoyably dissected, dissolved, destroyed and deconstructed, so that after it would – fortunately for the music theatre – keep coming back even stronger, as the ghostly appearance, in new and different contexts.
***
One more theoretical and empirical vampire-like revival of female/operatic body is presented with the theatre work Operrrra (is feminine). However, Operrrra’s opera-like feature is not obvious and direct. It is established on a metalevel by means of fourway director-composers authorial dispute with all of the opera’s vital points mentioned above. In that way, through director’s decision alone, three mutually very diverse composers’ achievements have been extracted from the institutional boundaries of musical practice and placed in the theatrically conducted interrelation. It is based on the web of discontinuities: each act is written by a different author and each is differently scored and performed by distinct performers; each act has its own scenic realization and, in the most general way, theme. That web was functionalized as Operrrra’s theoretical and practical platform for mapping the discursive space and potential of the voice in the reincarnated heterogeneous opera-like/opera/female bodies and traces of those bodies. For, people who have as little reason to sing [on the scene], as they have opportunity are operatic differentia specifica in the comparison to other drama and music-theatrical genres. If the voice on stage, on the top of everything, is female and high, then the opera-like feature of the opera is guaranteed: the coloratura is no mere form of outward exaggeration, but precisely in it the idea of opera emerges most purely as an extreme.
Female voice on opera stage is the fascinating ambivalent element that arouses in the listener a potent experience of a metaphysics as well as of a physics, of an immaterial as well as of a material world. Truly, the voice has been a medium of (Euridice’s) soul and, at the same time, a medium of the (Carmen’s) body; the cause of one’s unquenchable yearning and also one’s fears; a centering of the vocal game of desire, jouissance and unconditional surrender to a phantasmagoric fascination that is always doomed to failure. The voice is a mediator between the interior and the exterior of the body: from a complex interrelation between the anatomy and socialization of the female body and, consequently, the anatomy and socialization of the female voice, numerous myths of vocal (feminine) gender emerged. They include concepts such as nature, materiality, emotions and irrationality. Finally, as the phenomenon most directly associated with the body, the voice also connotes female sexuality: like the body, from which it emanates, the female voice is considered both a signifier of sexual otherness and a source of sexual power.
Therefore, woman’s singing on stage is not only – as Adorno said – the language of passion and an expression that nature prevails in man against all convention and mediation. It is the passion itself, genuine, pure, disarming and arming. While singing, the female body is more active than while speaking; it searches for and encourages the activity of other (scenic or listening/gazing) bodies in action. Consequently, the singing voice has a power to speak to the audience both through the opera’s musical and literary text and ‘beyond’ them. Among many different ways in which opera can do so, Operrrra directly and critically refers to three. Firstly, the voice of a woman on stage can autonomize itself from verbal meanings of the text sung and it can transform itself into vocal object radically purified from all signifying elements; it can – like Lacanian object /a/ – manipulate listeners’ desire while uncovering mechanisms of its work. Secondly, the female voice has an opportunity to redefine the problem of authorial subject of the music sung; identifying itself with a desire of the woman herself, it can renounce masculinistic mimesis of female speech and come closer to the musical (performing) écriture féminine. Thirdly, the female voice has a power of selfreflexion within an extension of or opening the parts of the operatic body towards popular culture.
Lively and resonant body is a ‘natural’ source of those powers of the female voice on opera stage. It is not any body, but a very distinctive one. For, in spite of exclusive status of the vocal operatic medium, in opera productions almost equal attention is payed to the spectacularization of the body; on the stage there is a woman: her ‘inner self’ is uncovered through her voice and her ‘external self’ is usually lighted and emphasized by means of scenographic and costimographic effects. In that way, actually, representation of a woman in opera unfolds within double layered, acoustic-visual field. It is constituted through intersection, mutual permeating and opposition of the relation ear-listening-female voice and ear-gaze-female body; in other words, by way of permanent and unpredictable oscillation between position subject-object both on the stage and off of it.
Disregarding the way the dynamics within individual listening and gazing contexts as well as between them is established, a woman – in the utmost case – appears on stage for the Other; he paid so that he could, hidden in darkness of the hall, secretly enjoy the outcomes of the empirical female and constructed operatic body. But, what happens if that relationship in opera is set vice versa? More concretely, what are the consequences on the ‘protocols of jouissance’ in the Operrrra’s opera-like features when the light form the stage spotlights the audience? When the guarantee of a visual unrepresentability is revoked from the opera devotees? When the desired female body on stage dissolves simultaneously with the operatic body? When the cold surface of the screen offers a fragment of a woman? Her shadow? Reflection? Trace? Could women be regarded as opera’s jewels then, as Catherine Clément wrote a long time ago? Do the powers of the female voice change in those conditions and in what way? Whose medium is that voice and whom does it speak to? Has it got a listener at all or do we submit to it with hope of reaching metaphysics on its wings, metaphysics from which we began the autopsy of the Oper(rrr)a? Or, in other words – to paraphrase Adorno at the end – the female operatic voice itself can never be irrational enough so that we could renounce it, and in spite of that renunciation, save our soul?
* This text was written in a form of a latent dialog with writers whose texts have – in higher or lesser degree, affirmatively or negatively – influenced theoretical, aesthetic and philosophical grounds of the project Operrrra (is feminine): with Carolyn Abbate, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Catherine Clément, Mladen Dolar, Jacques Lacan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Poizat, Kaja Silverman, Miško Šuvaković, Gary Tomlinson, Slavoj Žižek and Richard Wagner. Quotations form their works and key concepts of their theories, which were used in this text, are typed in italics.
ON POSTOPERATIC CERTAINTY
Jelena Novak
1. If you do know that tonight you are in the opera, we’ll grant you all the rest.
2. From its seeming to me – or to everyone – to be so, it doesn’t follow that it is so. What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it.
3. If e.g. someone says “I don’t know if I am in the opera”, he might be told “Look closer”- This possibility of satisfying oneself is part of the language-game. Is one of its essential features.
4. “I know I have a body”. In order to see how unclear the sense of this proposition is, consider its negation. At most it might be taken to mean “I know I have the organs of a human”.
5. Whether a proposition can turn out false after all depends on what I make count as determinants for that proposition.
6. The statement “I know I am in the opera” may than be continued: “It’s the opera I look at”, or “It’s the opera I hear”. Than a reasonable man will not doubt that I know. That this is an illusion has to be shown in a different way.
7. The fact that director has been given an opportunity to stage the opera is more important than the opera itself.
8. “It is possible to check the proposition based on experience” (we say). But how? By which means?
9. I dream I am in the opera and I was killed on stage by the weapons which look like virtual weapons of the video games. It erases square-shaped parts of my hands. There is no pain. I woke up with frustration and unbearable sense of impossibility to repair my own organism... If the dream is an experience, it is checkable. My body disappeared in the opera, but I still knew that I was there.
10. If I simultaneously claim “I know this is a botanic garden”, or “This is unfinished building of botanic faculty”, and “This is an opera”, it is a question how I believe that opera could be played out of the opera house.
11. If I say “Now we are in the opera”, how would you believe me?
12. When we start to believe in something, it is not single proposition we believe in, but the whole system of propositions. Doubt comes after faith.
13. If someone says: “I have a body”, we can ask “Who speaks by that mouth?”
14. If someone says: “My body is in the opera”, we will assume that one is saying that according to the experience, or based on the power to linguistically define his/her position and suggest it to the others.
15. When I write opera, what do I presume?
16. When we accept the term opera we are not defining the difference, gap, between some single works and range of the modernist opera project.
17. If there is no difference in the language, that it doesn’t exist.
18. If I say “I never heard/saw postopera”, where from did I get that knowledge? I didn’t calculate that, nobody told me; it is suggested by my memory. – So, I couldn’t make a mistake? Is that a truth I know? – All the other judgments will be crashed if I separate from that judgment.
19. If I would claim that Operrra is postopera, that wouldn’t be only an assumption.
20. That wouldn’t be an assumption, and I could say that with absolute certainty, as that is something un-doubtable. And does that mean we are speaking of unconditional truth? Is it possible that something I certainly recognize as postopera show as something completely different? Isn’t it able to astonish me?
21. The statement “I know...” is meaningful only connected to the rest of the knowledge archive.
22. Hans Thies Lehman knew that postdramatic theatre works are those in which primate of dramatic texts over the other texts disappeared. Experience taught him that?
23. I am often obsesses with some words. For example, “know” or “analogy”.
24. With what certainty I claim that notions signed as postdramatic theatre and postopera are analogous?
25. How do I establish analogy?
26. On the basis of the next facts: opera texts are not ordered according to hierarchy constructed on domination of some of them; unpossibility of establishing unity of the opera texts that build rhizome-like structure; reliability on institutions of mass art and mass media; existence of postopera, opera after opera, opera after the end of historical opera project and its symbolic death; includings of theory that consider and make legitimate opera works after the finished opera history; 'consciousness' of the opera in the age of technical/electronic/digital reproduction that counts both with multiplication of opera recordings and questioning of the possibilities of technical reproducibility and their conceptualization and performance within the piece.
27. Difference in the language is based on the experience and power. I am certainly confident only in power over my own body and voice. They belong just to me.
28. The power produces experience. Social aspect was always very important to the opera. By the opera, social power was shown. Opera was often a mirror, the sight of inscription of the body of the society, the sight of class struggles.
29. I know that the body and the voice in the opera produce differences.
30. The difference between postdramatic theatre and postopera is empirical: unlike the works of postdramatic theatre, postopera primarily questions, problematizes and redefines specific institution of opera, not the theatre.
31. What is the proof of me knowing something? The proof certainly is not the statement that I know.
32. What I can rely on?
33. Every language-game is based on recognition of the words and things. With the same inexorability we learn that it is a chair, and that 2x2=4.
34. It is not possible to recognize history. It is possible to produce it.
35. Constitution of operatic post-history corresponds with the context of “... strengthening of European and North American integrations, global market, and transnational media industries” in which “theatre is not contemporary trend, but anachronism” (Johannes Birringer). Traditional opera today is possible to be seen as a relict of distant times. It is eclectic and analogue, and as such, it is a foreigner in digital, information, technological, semiotic, media society.
36. Operrrra is postopera in posthistory.
37. If something would happen (if, for example, someone would tell me something), something that would be appropriate to wake mine doubts, it would certainly appear something that would make the causes of the doubt also suspicious, so that I could decide to keep my old faith.
38. And what if something really incredible would happen? If, for example, I would see that posthistory of the opera, without the obvious reason, becomes the pile of polished Italian stones...? Was I right, when, previously, I said “I know that is the posthistory?”
39. Language-game: bringing the bricks, revealing Little Murmaid, composing Classifieds improvizing on themes of popular songs, annunciation of the number of disposable stones. Sometimes one estimates the number, sometimes one establishes it by counting. Than the question is posed: “Do you believe that there is that much stones?”, and the answer is given: “I know that, I just counted it.”. But, “I know” could be omitted. If, however, there are more ways of certain establishing, like counting, weight measuring or sizing the pile, than “I know” could replace description how is to be known.
40. I knew that according to criteria of class and taste, opera was stranger in my world; just I was in opera’s. Corporeality of operatic, coloratura voices disturbed me, triviality of opera libretto plots was repulsive, and static staging was boring and anachronous.
41. Has that proposition excluded the certain type of mistake?
42. If someone believes that he/she is in botanic garden, I believe that he/she could be wrong.
43. I am sitting in the garden with philosopher; he repeats “I know that’s the tree” showing tree standing near us. Third person appears, hears that, and I say: “This man is not insane. We are just making philosophic conversation”.
44. Why we are here tonight? Because there is no opera house in this town? Because we like plants?
45. “I know that’s the opera”.
(Contents, methodology and way of constructing of this text are paraphrase and re/decomposition of the parts of text by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Über Gewwissheit, in: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Werkausgabe Band 8, Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1984. We used Serbian and English translation: Ludvig Vitgenštajn, O izvesnosti, Beograd, Fidelis, 1996, preveo Božidar Zec, Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, New York, Harper & Row, 1972).
1. If you do know that tonight you are in the opera, we’ll grant you all the rest.
2. From its seeming to me – or to everyone – to be so, it doesn’t follow that it is so. What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it.
3. If e.g. someone says “I don’t know if I am in the opera”, he might be told “Look closer”- This possibility of satisfying oneself is part of the language-game. Is one of its essential features.
4. “I know I have a body”. In order to see how unclear the sense of this proposition is, consider its negation. At most it might be taken to mean “I know I have the organs of a human”.
5. Whether a proposition can turn out false after all depends on what I make count as determinants for that proposition.
6. The statement “I know I am in the opera” may than be continued: “It’s the opera I look at”, or “It’s the opera I hear”. Than a reasonable man will not doubt that I know. That this is an illusion has to be shown in a different way.
7. The fact that director has been given an opportunity to stage the opera is more important than the opera itself.
8. “It is possible to check the proposition based on experience” (we say). But how? By which means?
9. I dream I am in the opera and I was killed on stage by the weapons which look like virtual weapons of the video games. It erases square-shaped parts of my hands. There is no pain. I woke up with frustration and unbearable sense of impossibility to repair my own organism... If the dream is an experience, it is checkable. My body disappeared in the opera, but I still knew that I was there.
10. If I simultaneously claim “I know this is a botanic garden”, or “This is unfinished building of botanic faculty”, and “This is an opera”, it is a question how I believe that opera could be played out of the opera house.
11. If I say “Now we are in the opera”, how would you believe me?
12. When we start to believe in something, it is not single proposition we believe in, but the whole system of propositions. Doubt comes after faith.
13. If someone says: “I have a body”, we can ask “Who speaks by that mouth?”
14. If someone says: “My body is in the opera”, we will assume that one is saying that according to the experience, or based on the power to linguistically define his/her position and suggest it to the others.
15. When I write opera, what do I presume?
16. When we accept the term opera we are not defining the difference, gap, between some single works and range of the modernist opera project.
17. If there is no difference in the language, that it doesn’t exist.
18. If I say “I never heard/saw postopera”, where from did I get that knowledge? I didn’t calculate that, nobody told me; it is suggested by my memory. – So, I couldn’t make a mistake? Is that a truth I know? – All the other judgments will be crashed if I separate from that judgment.
19. If I would claim that Operrra is postopera, that wouldn’t be only an assumption.
20. That wouldn’t be an assumption, and I could say that with absolute certainty, as that is something un-doubtable. And does that mean we are speaking of unconditional truth? Is it possible that something I certainly recognize as postopera show as something completely different? Isn’t it able to astonish me?
21. The statement “I know...” is meaningful only connected to the rest of the knowledge archive.
22. Hans Thies Lehman knew that postdramatic theatre works are those in which primate of dramatic texts over the other texts disappeared. Experience taught him that?
23. I am often obsesses with some words. For example, “know” or “analogy”.
24. With what certainty I claim that notions signed as postdramatic theatre and postopera are analogous?
25. How do I establish analogy?
26. On the basis of the next facts: opera texts are not ordered according to hierarchy constructed on domination of some of them; unpossibility of establishing unity of the opera texts that build rhizome-like structure; reliability on institutions of mass art and mass media; existence of postopera, opera after opera, opera after the end of historical opera project and its symbolic death; includings of theory that consider and make legitimate opera works after the finished opera history; 'consciousness' of the opera in the age of technical/electronic/digital reproduction that counts both with multiplication of opera recordings and questioning of the possibilities of technical reproducibility and their conceptualization and performance within the piece.
27. Difference in the language is based on the experience and power. I am certainly confident only in power over my own body and voice. They belong just to me.
28. The power produces experience. Social aspect was always very important to the opera. By the opera, social power was shown. Opera was often a mirror, the sight of inscription of the body of the society, the sight of class struggles.
29. I know that the body and the voice in the opera produce differences.
30. The difference between postdramatic theatre and postopera is empirical: unlike the works of postdramatic theatre, postopera primarily questions, problematizes and redefines specific institution of opera, not the theatre.
31. What is the proof of me knowing something? The proof certainly is not the statement that I know.
32. What I can rely on?
33. Every language-game is based on recognition of the words and things. With the same inexorability we learn that it is a chair, and that 2x2=4.
34. It is not possible to recognize history. It is possible to produce it.
35. Constitution of operatic post-history corresponds with the context of “... strengthening of European and North American integrations, global market, and transnational media industries” in which “theatre is not contemporary trend, but anachronism” (Johannes Birringer). Traditional opera today is possible to be seen as a relict of distant times. It is eclectic and analogue, and as such, it is a foreigner in digital, information, technological, semiotic, media society.
36. Operrrra is postopera in posthistory.
37. If something would happen (if, for example, someone would tell me something), something that would be appropriate to wake mine doubts, it would certainly appear something that would make the causes of the doubt also suspicious, so that I could decide to keep my old faith.
38. And what if something really incredible would happen? If, for example, I would see that posthistory of the opera, without the obvious reason, becomes the pile of polished Italian stones...? Was I right, when, previously, I said “I know that is the posthistory?”
39. Language-game: bringing the bricks, revealing Little Murmaid, composing Classifieds improvizing on themes of popular songs, annunciation of the number of disposable stones. Sometimes one estimates the number, sometimes one establishes it by counting. Than the question is posed: “Do you believe that there is that much stones?”, and the answer is given: “I know that, I just counted it.”. But, “I know” could be omitted. If, however, there are more ways of certain establishing, like counting, weight measuring or sizing the pile, than “I know” could replace description how is to be known.
40. I knew that according to criteria of class and taste, opera was stranger in my world; just I was in opera’s. Corporeality of operatic, coloratura voices disturbed me, triviality of opera libretto plots was repulsive, and static staging was boring and anachronous.
41. Has that proposition excluded the certain type of mistake?
42. If someone believes that he/she is in botanic garden, I believe that he/she could be wrong.
43. I am sitting in the garden with philosopher; he repeats “I know that’s the tree” showing tree standing near us. Third person appears, hears that, and I say: “This man is not insane. We are just making philosophic conversation”.
44. Why we are here tonight? Because there is no opera house in this town? Because we like plants?
45. “I know that’s the opera”.
(Contents, methodology and way of constructing of this text are paraphrase and re/decomposition of the parts of text by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Über Gewwissheit, in: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Werkausgabe Band 8, Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1984. We used Serbian and English translation: Ludvig Vitgenštajn, O izvesnosti, Beograd, Fidelis, 1996, preveo Božidar Zec, Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, New York, Harper & Row, 1972).
A Conversation on the Margins of Operrrra
Ana Vujanović with Bojan Djordjev
AV: Bojan, wherefrom the opera at all, here-and-now? What are your reasons? And what are your intentions with Operrrra...?
BĐ: Operrrra is a hybrid project conceived on the margins of opera, theatre, even television, in a marginal European culture such as Serbian. Just like the history of the Balkans is fragmented, without continuity, similarly the history of opera in this region is based on almost incidental premiers once in a decade or two. In the last couple of years with DreamOpera (TkH and Veličković), Narcissus and Echo (Đorđević), Zora D (Žebeljan), one staging of Nyman's opera and several stagings of traditional operas by Bojana Cvejić, this history accelerates a bit. All mentioned pieces are made as festival productions and don’t have their repertoire life – which means that this Operrrra is also an ‘incident’ in several ways. With the very combination of materials the position of the author is relativised. Only one of the three compositions/acts is composed especially for this occasion (but conceived as an independent piece). Furthermore, through staging, or better through its lack in the traditional sense of the word, this opera or a musical theatre piece thoroughly examines the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk in the age of media, primarily making an analogy between the concept of Richard Wagner and an MTV musical video clip, that takes its place.
As every proper opera, this one is also a commission. On my one I would never start the operatic machinery, but if I’m offered such an opportunity, I accept. What I want to offer with this theatre project that has the word opera in its title is the possibility of a different reflection upon opera today. First of all, a pro-theoretical thesis as its title (Opera of female gender) that is performed through three acts that offer three contemporary modes of perception and utilization of female (operatic) voice: from the excess fetishisation (Kapetanović), through flirting with author pop voice (Đorđević), to exploration of expressive possibilities of voice all the way to its destruction (Walshe). What is under the magnifying glass here is the constitutive element of an opera – that is (female) voice. Further, this performance works with margins of opera and theatre. All the machineries of any opera/theatre piece are set to motion here, but now they are exposed (backstage, venue preparations, almost pornographic details of performer’s body that ‘works’) while what is traditionally exposed to the audience (stage) in this case is mediated (projection screens are the only thing that audience can see). In that way the very pleasure in opera/performance/‘presence’ is delayed/postponed. Finally, the three acts of this opera, besides different ways in dealing with female voice, also contribute to the debate about opera as a popular or elite genre. All three compositions flirt with popular music – from Walshe’s explicit references to pop songs, to Kapetanović's eclectic postmodern layering of different (popular) music genres, to taking over the cantauthor principle by Đorđević.
AV: References to pop culture are often very obvious in your theatre and other artistic works. Why do you use term 'flirt' (or: procedure of flirt), especially in the context of problematics of pop culture? Dealing with pop culture is political and ideological work par excellence... And ‘flirting’ is a totally un-problematising approach; so I'm interested in how do you use it with pop culture, or with theatre and opera.
BĐ: The situation with pop culture in this cultural context is much more complex than it may seem. As you said ‘flirting’ is an un-problematising approach. However, in local context ‘flirting’ with popular music in the framework of contemporary music is an extremely transgressive act because what is desirable/proscribed in the dominant stream of academic composer’s discourse is ‘flirting’/working with ethno music. In that way, on a ‘macro’ level, ‘flirting’ with pop becomes a problematising act par excellence, even a sort of political and ideological statement. What I do with pop culture in my projects (primarily in a long term project Desert of Picture with Siniša Ilić, started in 2002 in Belgium) is using pop images as readymade taken from the omnipresent surrounding (media) culture.
Thesis about the death of the opera (several events – opera premieres primarily, from the first half of 20th century compete for the exact date of that death) is well-known for some time already. Anyone who composes, even stages an opera must position him/herself in relation to that thesis. If course, opera is very lively for a deceased, and it seems that it leads even several post-mortem lives: as an elite art of experiment and exploration at the connoisseur festivals of contemporary opera; as a constitutive element of a national identity of a modern European state in state and/or municipal theatres; as entertainment for the millions (The Three Tenors at stadiums, Mercury/Caballet and Barcelona…); and as entertainment industry through publishing of CDs, DVDs etc. In that way, opera today is inescapably part of popular culture, which is not far from its past, especially in the 19th century. However, in this work, dealing with pop culture/music is primarily present in the musical texts and to a certain extent in the staging – using typical technologies of mass media (TV broadcasting system, video, etc.) while the way of using it is everything but popular – no narrative, no mimesis, ‘presence’ and live performance is mediated, usage of documentary materials from rehearsals and construction of the venue etc.
AV: You talk about and refer to (as well as our other collaborators) the death of opera as important determinant of this work. But, that work – regarding its programmatic (author's) conception, director's staging, many concrete arrangements of the venue/space (unfinished concrete building that is transforming into total stage), locating spectatorship and video, as well as regarding the junction of three independent and different compositions into unique work – is, at the same time, an attempt of re-opening possibilities for Gesamtkunstwerk, which is the climax of opera and its total and totalising universe.
The reference cannot be avoided, so I would like you to explain it. Particularly since there is a problem here that makes all the questions more complex. That is that »your Gesamtkunstwerk« is immanently non-coherent, is de-fragmented from the inside, it misses constantly the totality, which Gesamtkunstwerk from 19th century tried to reach. You position yourself as Wilsonean director-architect who projects the work quite arbitrarily using particular elements (that are not, from the very beginning, determined strongly by director's requirements). Be so kind to explain your relations to the discourse, form, and ideology of Gesamtkunstwerk within Operrrra, as well as relations between that concept and the concept and practice of the death of opera.
BĐ: I have already mentioned that this work deals with margins of theatre and opera, and in that way Gesamtkunstwerk as well. In the same way in which opera as a project of Firentine cameratta, conceived as a renewal of Greek tragedy was doomed to failure from the very beginning, Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk was also doomed to failure, because the return to the supposed unity of music, stage and word is not possible. More specifically, the very realization of Wagner’s concept was not consequent (I refer to Adolphe Appia here), because however radical his reforms were in regard to the music-text relationship, musical structure of the opera, even the opera venue, the staging stayed ‘unconvincing’ and disproportionate to the ‘seriousness’ and ‘graveness’ of the other reforms. As you said, Operrrra (that is its staging/staging) questions the possibility of Gesamtkunstwerk today, but baring in mind the impossibility of it; further: relying on the entire 20th century resistance to mimesis, experiences of ambient and installation art, even body art; even further: relying on the (modified) technology of TV broadcast, etc. And every of these references is in it self an idea of Gesamtkunstwerk.
Death of opera for me is above all an ending to the modernist progress and development – similar thing can be said for drama (post-dramatic theatre and post-opera). That means that each new opera must be an opera about opera, to position itself in relation to the finished modernist opera project, historic operatic techniques and concepts (such as Gesamtkunstwerk, such as bell canto, such as discussion music-libretto relationship, etc.). Therefore my procedure as a director could be called a ‘curatorial’ one – single acts and prologue of the opera are either commissioned or ‘re-discovered’ (Little Mermaid), and re/contextualized in the light of the central thread of the project, in this case the female voice.
When you mentioned director-architect, I can not resist not to read it ‘erroneously’ and mention the venue where Operrrra is realized – unfinished building of the Botanic Institute of the Faculty of Biology in the Botanical Garden. Unfinished building of an institute of a faculty that doesn’t have its own building. Experimental opera in a country with a very week opera tradition that consists of more-less one world premiere per decade or even two decades – and isolated (at the beginning of the text) mentioned ‘steps forward’ in the new treatment of opera are BY DEFAULT realized outside even two opera stages in the city, while an opera house (that is a landmark of urbanism, history, culture and national/state identity of every European capital) doesn’t exist. So this situation of an opera in the botanical garden resembles the construction of the opera house in the Amazon in Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo.
AV: That is why I believe this conversation – in which you articulate your author's positions precisely – is important. Since, as many time up to now, you act with this work in an erased space, wherein almost only inconclusive shadows of traces elapse. So the very context does not obligate you; you are not in situation to bear hard ballast of tradition, neither of expectations. An (unbearable) freedom of self-responsibility is given to you a priori; responsibility that is in your own hands and the hands of your conceptualization and contextualization of the work, which will be also trigger for history.
Therefore, at last I would ask you to define your own comprehension of Operrrra's politics, politics of its procedures and discourse. Considering the concept and the structure of the work itself, I suggest you to think on the line of Jacques Rancier speaking about political art as the crossing that wipes and/or re-disposes the borders between high and popular art, artistic disciplines, different social practices, as well as between art and life - in opposite to tactics of post-modernistic assemblage or confrontation of phenomena and practices from different regimes, whose borders maintain unchallenged. What position is closer to your own? ...I by myself tend to firmer material framing practices, just in order to show that the framings belong to the domains of social competences and mandates; so I have got an ambiguous relationship to your fluctuation through the regimes of high art-pop culture, of theatre-opera-performance, jouissance-art-pro-feministic action, completed »piece«-projected social situation... Thereby this question, as well as the reference to Rancier (Politics of Aesthetics), is directed to support your articulation of your own conception and to face yourself with the responsibility you take for it.
BĐ: I have mentioned several times margins/borders – whether of the two (or more) media, or two regimes of art (elite and popular). What drives me most on my work in the performing arts is the very question of the borders and changing/redefining/displacing the status of an art piece (even the notion of ‘piece’ towards the notion of ‘work’). In Wittgensteinian sense, I think that every new project must set up the ‘new rules of the game’ and in that sense change, expand or contract the borders of the media. What I’m interested in is the politics of form (by which the ruling paradigm is changed), and opera (or Operrrra) formulated as an (from the start unsuccessful) attempt of a Gesamtkunstwerk is an ideal ground for testing the borders and their solidity/permeability/changeability.
You are right when you say that Operrrra is realized in an erased space. However, opera projects that I mentioned earlier as ‘incidents’ do create a referent system. On the other side Operrrra firmly relies on the references from abroad, that is the notion of ‘opera in the age of media’ (J. Novak) and authors such as Willson/Glass, Greenaway/Andriessen, Reich etc. With every new work, these authors give an answer to the question about the death of the opera, that is about the new reincarnation/recombination of constitutive elements (radical re-defining of the performing ensemble, choice of libretto, abolishing of staging by introducing video, etc.), and in relation to the changes in the bourgeois society of late capitalism. If we start with the thesis that Opera is the top art accomplishment of Western (European) civilization and that in order to explain the European society to a hypothetical anthropologist from Mars, we would take him/her to an opera performance, then everything that is happening in opera in the sense of changing the paradigm of the genre, is a political act par excellence.
This project is in a way a hommage to the baroque opera theatre of machines, it is a testing ground for ‘performability’ of those elements which are not human body. In this opera, besides the musicians and singers, the performers are also: the ambiance, the TV technology, but also those constitutive functions of any theatre project that typically not viewed as such: director, dramaturge, musicologists, visual artist/designer, film director, sound designer. So this is a theatre without actors, this is opera without stage (further: without mimesis, without narrative, with no literary connection between the prologue and the three acts, etc.); this arbitrarily composed machinery sets in motion ‘margins’ of every theatre project and puts them in power – and that is its politics.
AV: Bojan, wherefrom the opera at all, here-and-now? What are your reasons? And what are your intentions with Operrrra...?
BĐ: Operrrra is a hybrid project conceived on the margins of opera, theatre, even television, in a marginal European culture such as Serbian. Just like the history of the Balkans is fragmented, without continuity, similarly the history of opera in this region is based on almost incidental premiers once in a decade or two. In the last couple of years with DreamOpera (TkH and Veličković), Narcissus and Echo (Đorđević), Zora D (Žebeljan), one staging of Nyman's opera and several stagings of traditional operas by Bojana Cvejić, this history accelerates a bit. All mentioned pieces are made as festival productions and don’t have their repertoire life – which means that this Operrrra is also an ‘incident’ in several ways. With the very combination of materials the position of the author is relativised. Only one of the three compositions/acts is composed especially for this occasion (but conceived as an independent piece). Furthermore, through staging, or better through its lack in the traditional sense of the word, this opera or a musical theatre piece thoroughly examines the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk in the age of media, primarily making an analogy between the concept of Richard Wagner and an MTV musical video clip, that takes its place.
As every proper opera, this one is also a commission. On my one I would never start the operatic machinery, but if I’m offered such an opportunity, I accept. What I want to offer with this theatre project that has the word opera in its title is the possibility of a different reflection upon opera today. First of all, a pro-theoretical thesis as its title (Opera of female gender) that is performed through three acts that offer three contemporary modes of perception and utilization of female (operatic) voice: from the excess fetishisation (Kapetanović), through flirting with author pop voice (Đorđević), to exploration of expressive possibilities of voice all the way to its destruction (Walshe). What is under the magnifying glass here is the constitutive element of an opera – that is (female) voice. Further, this performance works with margins of opera and theatre. All the machineries of any opera/theatre piece are set to motion here, but now they are exposed (backstage, venue preparations, almost pornographic details of performer’s body that ‘works’) while what is traditionally exposed to the audience (stage) in this case is mediated (projection screens are the only thing that audience can see). In that way the very pleasure in opera/performance/‘presence’ is delayed/postponed. Finally, the three acts of this opera, besides different ways in dealing with female voice, also contribute to the debate about opera as a popular or elite genre. All three compositions flirt with popular music – from Walshe’s explicit references to pop songs, to Kapetanović's eclectic postmodern layering of different (popular) music genres, to taking over the cantauthor principle by Đorđević.
AV: References to pop culture are often very obvious in your theatre and other artistic works. Why do you use term 'flirt' (or: procedure of flirt), especially in the context of problematics of pop culture? Dealing with pop culture is political and ideological work par excellence... And ‘flirting’ is a totally un-problematising approach; so I'm interested in how do you use it with pop culture, or with theatre and opera.
BĐ: The situation with pop culture in this cultural context is much more complex than it may seem. As you said ‘flirting’ is an un-problematising approach. However, in local context ‘flirting’ with popular music in the framework of contemporary music is an extremely transgressive act because what is desirable/proscribed in the dominant stream of academic composer’s discourse is ‘flirting’/working with ethno music. In that way, on a ‘macro’ level, ‘flirting’ with pop becomes a problematising act par excellence, even a sort of political and ideological statement. What I do with pop culture in my projects (primarily in a long term project Desert of Picture with Siniša Ilić, started in 2002 in Belgium) is using pop images as readymade taken from the omnipresent surrounding (media) culture.
Thesis about the death of the opera (several events – opera premieres primarily, from the first half of 20th century compete for the exact date of that death) is well-known for some time already. Anyone who composes, even stages an opera must position him/herself in relation to that thesis. If course, opera is very lively for a deceased, and it seems that it leads even several post-mortem lives: as an elite art of experiment and exploration at the connoisseur festivals of contemporary opera; as a constitutive element of a national identity of a modern European state in state and/or municipal theatres; as entertainment for the millions (The Three Tenors at stadiums, Mercury/Caballet and Barcelona…); and as entertainment industry through publishing of CDs, DVDs etc. In that way, opera today is inescapably part of popular culture, which is not far from its past, especially in the 19th century. However, in this work, dealing with pop culture/music is primarily present in the musical texts and to a certain extent in the staging – using typical technologies of mass media (TV broadcasting system, video, etc.) while the way of using it is everything but popular – no narrative, no mimesis, ‘presence’ and live performance is mediated, usage of documentary materials from rehearsals and construction of the venue etc.
AV: You talk about and refer to (as well as our other collaborators) the death of opera as important determinant of this work. But, that work – regarding its programmatic (author's) conception, director's staging, many concrete arrangements of the venue/space (unfinished concrete building that is transforming into total stage), locating spectatorship and video, as well as regarding the junction of three independent and different compositions into unique work – is, at the same time, an attempt of re-opening possibilities for Gesamtkunstwerk, which is the climax of opera and its total and totalising universe.
The reference cannot be avoided, so I would like you to explain it. Particularly since there is a problem here that makes all the questions more complex. That is that »your Gesamtkunstwerk« is immanently non-coherent, is de-fragmented from the inside, it misses constantly the totality, which Gesamtkunstwerk from 19th century tried to reach. You position yourself as Wilsonean director-architect who projects the work quite arbitrarily using particular elements (that are not, from the very beginning, determined strongly by director's requirements). Be so kind to explain your relations to the discourse, form, and ideology of Gesamtkunstwerk within Operrrra, as well as relations between that concept and the concept and practice of the death of opera.
BĐ: I have already mentioned that this work deals with margins of theatre and opera, and in that way Gesamtkunstwerk as well. In the same way in which opera as a project of Firentine cameratta, conceived as a renewal of Greek tragedy was doomed to failure from the very beginning, Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk was also doomed to failure, because the return to the supposed unity of music, stage and word is not possible. More specifically, the very realization of Wagner’s concept was not consequent (I refer to Adolphe Appia here), because however radical his reforms were in regard to the music-text relationship, musical structure of the opera, even the opera venue, the staging stayed ‘unconvincing’ and disproportionate to the ‘seriousness’ and ‘graveness’ of the other reforms. As you said, Operrrra (that is its staging/staging) questions the possibility of Gesamtkunstwerk today, but baring in mind the impossibility of it; further: relying on the entire 20th century resistance to mimesis, experiences of ambient and installation art, even body art; even further: relying on the (modified) technology of TV broadcast, etc. And every of these references is in it self an idea of Gesamtkunstwerk.
Death of opera for me is above all an ending to the modernist progress and development – similar thing can be said for drama (post-dramatic theatre and post-opera). That means that each new opera must be an opera about opera, to position itself in relation to the finished modernist opera project, historic operatic techniques and concepts (such as Gesamtkunstwerk, such as bell canto, such as discussion music-libretto relationship, etc.). Therefore my procedure as a director could be called a ‘curatorial’ one – single acts and prologue of the opera are either commissioned or ‘re-discovered’ (Little Mermaid), and re/contextualized in the light of the central thread of the project, in this case the female voice.
When you mentioned director-architect, I can not resist not to read it ‘erroneously’ and mention the venue where Operrrra is realized – unfinished building of the Botanic Institute of the Faculty of Biology in the Botanical Garden. Unfinished building of an institute of a faculty that doesn’t have its own building. Experimental opera in a country with a very week opera tradition that consists of more-less one world premiere per decade or even two decades – and isolated (at the beginning of the text) mentioned ‘steps forward’ in the new treatment of opera are BY DEFAULT realized outside even two opera stages in the city, while an opera house (that is a landmark of urbanism, history, culture and national/state identity of every European capital) doesn’t exist. So this situation of an opera in the botanical garden resembles the construction of the opera house in the Amazon in Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo.
AV: That is why I believe this conversation – in which you articulate your author's positions precisely – is important. Since, as many time up to now, you act with this work in an erased space, wherein almost only inconclusive shadows of traces elapse. So the very context does not obligate you; you are not in situation to bear hard ballast of tradition, neither of expectations. An (unbearable) freedom of self-responsibility is given to you a priori; responsibility that is in your own hands and the hands of your conceptualization and contextualization of the work, which will be also trigger for history.
Therefore, at last I would ask you to define your own comprehension of Operrrra's politics, politics of its procedures and discourse. Considering the concept and the structure of the work itself, I suggest you to think on the line of Jacques Rancier speaking about political art as the crossing that wipes and/or re-disposes the borders between high and popular art, artistic disciplines, different social practices, as well as between art and life - in opposite to tactics of post-modernistic assemblage or confrontation of phenomena and practices from different regimes, whose borders maintain unchallenged. What position is closer to your own? ...I by myself tend to firmer material framing practices, just in order to show that the framings belong to the domains of social competences and mandates; so I have got an ambiguous relationship to your fluctuation through the regimes of high art-pop culture, of theatre-opera-performance, jouissance-art-pro-feministic action, completed »piece«-projected social situation... Thereby this question, as well as the reference to Rancier (Politics of Aesthetics), is directed to support your articulation of your own conception and to face yourself with the responsibility you take for it.
BĐ: I have mentioned several times margins/borders – whether of the two (or more) media, or two regimes of art (elite and popular). What drives me most on my work in the performing arts is the very question of the borders and changing/redefining/displacing the status of an art piece (even the notion of ‘piece’ towards the notion of ‘work’). In Wittgensteinian sense, I think that every new project must set up the ‘new rules of the game’ and in that sense change, expand or contract the borders of the media. What I’m interested in is the politics of form (by which the ruling paradigm is changed), and opera (or Operrrra) formulated as an (from the start unsuccessful) attempt of a Gesamtkunstwerk is an ideal ground for testing the borders and their solidity/permeability/changeability.
You are right when you say that Operrrra is realized in an erased space. However, opera projects that I mentioned earlier as ‘incidents’ do create a referent system. On the other side Operrrra firmly relies on the references from abroad, that is the notion of ‘opera in the age of media’ (J. Novak) and authors such as Willson/Glass, Greenaway/Andriessen, Reich etc. With every new work, these authors give an answer to the question about the death of the opera, that is about the new reincarnation/recombination of constitutive elements (radical re-defining of the performing ensemble, choice of libretto, abolishing of staging by introducing video, etc.), and in relation to the changes in the bourgeois society of late capitalism. If we start with the thesis that Opera is the top art accomplishment of Western (European) civilization and that in order to explain the European society to a hypothetical anthropologist from Mars, we would take him/her to an opera performance, then everything that is happening in opera in the sense of changing the paradigm of the genre, is a political act par excellence.
This project is in a way a hommage to the baroque opera theatre of machines, it is a testing ground for ‘performability’ of those elements which are not human body. In this opera, besides the musicians and singers, the performers are also: the ambiance, the TV technology, but also those constitutive functions of any theatre project that typically not viewed as such: director, dramaturge, musicologists, visual artist/designer, film director, sound designer. So this is a theatre without actors, this is opera without stage (further: without mimesis, without narrative, with no literary connection between the prologue and the three acts, etc.); this arbitrarily composed machinery sets in motion ‘margins’ of every theatre project and puts them in power – and that is its politics.
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