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Opera in Performance elucidates the performative dimension of contemporary opera productions. What are the most striking and decisive moments in a performance? Why do we respond so strongly to stagings that transform familiar scenes, to performers’ bodily presence, and to virtuosic voices as well as ill-disposed ones? Drawing on phenomenology and performance theory, Clemens Risi explains how these moments arise out of a dialogue between performers and the audience, representation and presence, the familiar and the new. He then applies these insights in critical descriptions of his own experiences of various singers, stagings, and performances at opera houses and festivals from across the German-speaking world over the last twenty years. As the first book to focus on what happens in performance as such, this study shifts our attention to moments that have eluded articulation and provides tools for describing our own experiences when we go to the opera. This book will particularly interest scholars and students in theater and performance studies, musicology, and the humanities, and may also appeal to operagoers and theater professionals.
The study of the business of opera has taken on new importance in the present harsh economic climate for the arts. This book presents research that sheds new light on a range of aspects concerning marketing, audience development, promotion, arts administration and economic issues that beset professionals working in the opera world. The editors' aim has been to assemble a coherent collection of essays that engage with a single theme (business), but differ in topic and critical perspective. The collection is distinguished by its concern with the business of opera here and now in a globalized market. This includes newly commissioned operas, sponsorship, state funding, and production and marketing of historic operas in the twenty-first century.
This insightful book explores the relationship between theater and digital culture. The authors show that the marriage of traditional performance with new technologies leads to an upheaval of the implicit “live” quality of theatre by introducing media interfaces and Internet protocols, all the while blurring the barriers between theater-makers and their audience.
Classical Concert Studies: A Companion to Contemporary Research and Performance is a landmark publication that maps out a new interdisciplinary field of Concert Studies, offering fresh ways of understanding the classical music concert in the twenty-first century. It brings together essays, research articles, and case studies from scholars and music professionals including musicians, music managers, and concert designers. Gathering both historical and contemporary cases, the contributors draw on approaches from sociology, ethnology, musicology, cultural studies, and other disciplines to create a rich portrait of the classical concert’s past, present, and future. Based on two earlier volumes published in German under the title Das Konzert (The Concert), and with a selection of new chapters written for the English edition, this companion enables students, researchers, and practitioners in the classical and contemporary music fields to understand this emerging field of research, go beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and methodologies, and spark a renaissance for the classical concert.
From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht's writings.Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Joy H. Calico argues that Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and that his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis. From an award-winning author, the first thorough examination of the important influence of opera on Brecht's writings.Brecht at the Opera looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brech
From its very beginnings, theatre has been both an art and a public space, shared by actors and spectators. As a result, its entity and history is intimately tied to politics: a politics of inclusion and exclusion, of distributions and placements, of spatial appropriation and utopian concepts. This collection examines what is at stake when a theatrical space is created and when a performance takes place; it asks under what circumstances the topology of theatre becomes political. The book approaches this issue from various angles, taking theatre as a cultural paradigm for political dimensions of space in its respective historical context. Visiting the political dimensions of theatrical space ...
This collection about the early music movement will appeal to performers, teachers, academics, instrument makers, amateur musicians, and music lovers. With chapters about new ways to study, teach, perform, and listen to early music, there is something to appeal to everyone. The diverse group of authors--from young to established voices who live across the globe--offer positive, diverse, exciting, and challenging points of view about how the early music movement can go forward into the future.
Since the beginning of theatre history, scandals have taken place and the variety of causes, processes and types of interactions makes them an interesting object of study. Theatre scandals often indicate clashes with a dominant ideology or with the ideology of a particular group in society. Sometimes, following a scandal, the attacked ideology changes and incorporates the possibility of the aesthetics or themes that caused the clash. In this way, scandals can cause dynamic changes within cultural systems. Next to theoretical considerations the contributors, all members of the IFTR Theatrical Event Working Group, present in their various case studies a wide cultural and chronological diversity of theatre scandals, all of which were experienced as very shocking moments in theatre history.
Art and politics are related through repetition. Both realms are structured by practices of repetition and share a common room of sens(e)uality – aesthetics in the emphatic sense of the word. It is the aesthetics and practices of repetition that reveal the relation between both realms. This volume proposes to explore aesthetic and cultural phenomena that effect change in the non-aesthetical realm, not so much in spite, but precisely because of their being 'mere' repetitions. Repetition shapes art works through procedures and processes of reproduction, copying, depiction, or reenactment. As representation of the world, mimetic art's relationship to the political and social world can be conc...
"Nineteenth-century writer Karl May wrote novels about a fictionalized American Wild West that count among the most popular books of German literature to this day. His stories left an imprint on German culture, resulting in a variety of Wild West festivals featuring Native Americans and frontier settlers. These Karl May festivals are hosted widely throughout German-speaking countries today. This book, based on years of fieldwork observing and studying the festivals, plays, events, and groups that comprise this subculture, addresses a larger, timely issue: cultural transfer and appropriations. Are Germans dressing up in American Indian costumes paying tribute or offending the cultures they are representing? Avoiding simplistic answers, A. Dana Weber considers the complexity of cultural enactments as they relate both to the distinctly German phenomenon as well as to larger questions of cultural representations in American and European live performance traditions."