Class Notes- Levin and Auslander (Iris)

Amy- We’re still waiting to hear from people re: Chicago. Email Amy ASAP. It’ll be fun! Jennifer will let us use her awesome house. The plan is to drive up Friday for evening show and matinee on Saturday, either leave Saturday evening or Sunday. There will be transportation options.

Ellen- Let’s start with Levin, connect continuities between the two readings. What is Levin putting forth? What is the radical act, the nature of the intervention? Are any of these key terms useful for our purposes?

Jennifer- We always struggle for a definition in this class, It seems like Levin is trying to pin down the meaning of the word “unsettled”.

Amy- Before that, let’s start with defining “dramaturgy” and “mise en scene”.

Cody- “Mise en scene” is staging, literally to put on the stage.

Ellen- A more high falutin’ of saying it, and Levin uses these two terms separately. In the history of opera productions, the impresario not only nails down scheduling but ultimately also takes over staging. Operas had very short rehearsal periods, so the stager was mostly directing traffic.

Derek- “Mise en scene” refers to set construction, everything that goes into the visual.

Justin- It’s everything that the spectator witnesses- the sets, the programs, the things in the lobby- a lot of this was missing in the article because Levin talks about film as having equal merit.

Ellen- It’s every artistic decision that goes into the creation of the spectacle.

Amy- This is a recent term, late 1800s or early 1900s, around the rise of the director. Prior to that, there was no term or person responsible for unifying.

Ellen- Realism is contingent on the idea of the single viewpoint.

Amy- stories were told onstage, but how people got to their places, what they were wearing, etc, were not determined by a central eye but based on things like attractiveness of garment, expediency, decorum, shorthand. How does this relate to dramaturgy. In fact, how do we define dramaturgy?

Whitney- A dramaturg is the person who does the historical research for the show. In relation to mise en scene, it’s the way the unifying eye becomes allowable, all the research that goes into how to tell the story based on its background.

Justin- I like that this discussion shows the morph of the dramaturg from director to historian.

Jess- It talks about how to apply theory to practice, bridges the two.

Amy- A dramaturg can also can be someone thinking about the dramatic compostion, how the play is put together, how it functions as an organism. They are responsible for understanding how to help the story come to life onstage. The difference between a story in the abstract and a story told onstage.

Ellen- Levin is a dramaturg, so he’s very invested in this. He has experience being shunted to the side, which happens during radical realizations of opera. Ideally there is communication between all branches, including the dramaturg, who can bring in all kinds of scholarly intervention.

Dorothy- I liked the differentiation between opera text and performance text. Interesting- Levin talks about Wagner, whose operas we do radically imagine, but performance text is important in talking about opera because there are unwritten things that don’t change- some lines are always said a certain way.

Ellen- Opera has extremely strong and fixed reportorial conventions that don’t exist as strongly elsewhere. It’s the distinction between archive and the repertoire.

Derek- The history of opera is interesting because it shows the fixity of operatic conventions have been contested in a cylical manner.

Ellen- On a relatively short timeline- prior to totalitarianism in Germany, there was a rise of n opera that was restarted after the war.

Amy- Levin talks about the fabula and the theatrical on page 12- what does that mean?

Jenna- It’s distinguishing between theatre and drama that we use- drama is the text as it’s given, theater is a larger reimagining of the text.

Ellen- Absolutely, and there’s no hierarchy between the two, those elements are integral and there’s no accident that this paragraph ends with his first use of the word “polylogical”. Do we know what this means? Heterodiegesis- competing authors. Poly-  implies competing information.

Amy- Diegenic suggests place. Hetero suggests more than one.

Ellen- It’s a really useful term. What’s going on in the confines of the story, like a musical score over the action of a film, etc.

Amy- Fabula is the fable. Can have a story, but how that is staged is the theatrical.

Sara- The word Fabula is used instead of text because it’s the story in its purest form, beyond the text- Chronological storytelling.

Amy- On pages 22-23, Levin seems to be walking us towards his unsettledness. Once someone is playing a character, set somewhere, costumed, it’s hard to pin down one coherent, stable meaning.

Ellen- Like when the text says one thing and the music works against it.

Dorothy- This is also interesting because of the chronology of opera, which is based on contemporary understandings of what sounds happy and sad. It’s really defined standards of performance because people don’t want to see obscure operas.

Ellen- There’s the question of tragedy- why do we take pleasure in sadness? The question in opera- why do we care if a soprano dies of tuberculosis? Pleasure in musical virtuosity doesn’t map well into the text- libretto was merely decorative until recently. Lately, we’ve started to acknowledge the ways in which opera depends on dissonances- which comes back to our prompt- there’s a lot in opera that we are expected not to notice. The plausibility of the casting, the inability of vocal prowess to be present with acting prowess. Lately, physical dexterity is being increasingly demanded of singers. The audience response to this has been greatly hostile- a kneejerk opposition.

Amy- Given all of that, what is Levin’s project, what’s the intervention he’s trying to make?

Jennifer- The problem with musicology is that it addressed opera once it started changing. Opens his argument talking about how it brought other information systems, and seemed to appreciate that, but then says that academics are studying the classics and not the changes that have been made.

Ellen- Critique on how you can’t know opera if you don’t go to opera. It used to be that opera studies were based solely on the score so analyzing performance is pretty radical. What’s Levin’s hesitation with this?

Jenna- It says that performance is untouchable, it exists and you can’t think while you’re watching it, you just appreciate it and move on.

Ellen- The transcendence of its experience is past rendering- uses the term absorption, a positive term in this sense. The other problem is that she says opera is only alive in performance because it’s not preservable, and the scholarship is heavily impressionistic.  Levin decides to only talk about opera productions available on DVD- that exist as consumables that can be ordered and watched. Of course we lose the immediacy, but isn’t it better to accommodate than to neglect the productions that have happened before this present moment? If we can’t preserve, we can still engage these performances. Isn’t it crazy to use the program to think about the production and say we can’t use the DVD? It’s surprisingly radically how exclusionary this has been. Since we have the recording, why can’t we make use of it?

Dorothy- It has to do with the traditional attachment to the score. Films of operas give us the ability to compare specific performances, so the score is no longer the only source of information. Helps solidify the foundation against changing interpretations.

Courtney- Levin admits that this approach leaves things out, but it seems like an honest move, as a critic. There’s no way to verify information otherwise.

Justin- it jumped out so much because of the name of the chapter- viewing a video of a production gives a whole different mise en scene.

Sara- A lot of close up shots are used, you can’t see the whole stage.

Justin- And then the videos are shown on PBS or in theatres, changing the mise en scene again.

Jennifer- a bad seat in an opera house will affect mise en scene more than seeing it on a theatre screen.

Jess- It’s the difference between football on tv- able to replay, rewind, and pause- and in the arena- ephemeral. The Don Giovanni production from 2000 on Youtube gave me the chills. It was different from being there, but it’s a cake or pie comparison.

Andrea- There’s a quote about wanting to be transported and wanting to think about where we’re going- absorb vs. analyze.

Amy- He’s not trying to set up an either/or- but in order to do both, we need to allow the recorded event as an examinable trace of a past performance.

Sara- I appreciate the nuance of the argument, but it’s just laughable. Even one video of the original production of Oedipus would be invaluable to the theater community.

Dorothy- Opera has a weird snobbery about not having recordings. Books talk about great singers that no one alive has heard. It’s hard to respect these singers that can’t even be described.

Ellen- What makes opera studies so excellent is that the ideas are so entrenched. It allows us to see the self-forgettings and regulatory norms which trickle into other types of performance that we might not have noticed. Hyperbole in opera is off the spectrum- but powerful self-blinding exists in realist theatre, and we don’t notice it. It’s useful to see the deeper connections. The value of mise en scene is that it brings out the unsettled, and productions become a kind of scholarly inquiry that must be addressed. Part of what’s happening is that these things are being called aesthetically bad.

Amy- Going back to our prompt and what we’re asked to forget- opera asks us to forget key elements of the physicality of the soprano. Auslander is making visible and trying to separate three things that get smushed together - performer, persona, and character. There’s some very useful criticism of Auslander, but I’m curious as to what is helpful about that? What becomes revisable from these performances?

Jennifer- We tried to find this bridge on the blog, but we didn’t get far. Andrea brought up Lady Gaga, but struggled to bring it into opera.

Andrea- I was thinking about the way these male performers use their personas to embody their sexuality- you don’t know how David Bowie’s sexuality relates to that of his persona. When it comes to more modern performers and their spectacle, I could only think  of women, and didn’t see as much ambiguous sexuality as much as heternormative. Maybe for them, the persona is used to embody the person’s sexuality.

Jennifer- Female self-presentation- women behave as if they’re being viewed by others, men don’t as much. Sopranos in opera- show off the virtuosity of their voice as well as act.

Dorothy- The connection between person and persona exists in opera it’s, just not as open. There are four or five voice ranges, and a low voiced person is never a virgin. They’re either an old woman, a witch, or a young man. There’s  clearly a different person underneath. The lack of choice is interesting to me.

Jennifer- So, the voice register affects who you play onstage, but weight, gender, and other important things  don’t. That’s so weird.

Jess- Opera is one of the only performance forms that ignores the body. We make accommodations because we are transported by the voice. Why does opera operate under a different value system than theatre, when the body is so critical to what you’re seeing?  Do female performers just exaggerate their femininity?

Andrea- When men are glam rockers, they’re contradicting the social norm. When women do the same thing, they don’t contradict, they exaggerate.

Jess- Susie Quattro was very much like Joan Jett, sort of putting on a similar androgyny to the men. It wasn’t as transgressive- tom boys are normal, boys wearing dresses are not.

Dorothy- There’s a new movement to police the bodies of opera singers.

Jennifer- Are these changes coming alongside what Levin was talking about?

Dorothy- no, it’s commercial.

Jess- We laugh at the idea of two fat people singing together as Romeo and Juliet- how do you invest in that while pretending not to see it? There’s a lot more push to have singers with normative body types, whether it’s good or not.

Jennifer- Can we bring this awareness to examine the audience’s reaction to David Bowie and Mark Bolan?

Ellen- Cody, you talked about the question of sincerity in Auslander’s article. I think your characterization is on target, he’s definitely a spectator, putting the events in a bubble of his framework, for better or worse. In what way do you find him methodologically insincere?

Cody- The article hinges on queer theory,  but he seems uninvolved in the history of queer identity and subculture. Someone seeing David Bowie is seeing a spectacle. Someone going to a drag ball has a socio-economic stake in it. His argument lacks nuance.

Ellen- There’s a parallel between opera and glam rock- opera works on hyperbole and asks you to ignore it. Glam rock is about messing with norms, playfully. Same bag of tricks, different conventions of reception. There’s a large community of queer opera goers with high stakes in what is real and allowable. Is it possible that Bowie is doing things that are resonant to this population? His argument is that gender is not political, simply decorative. It’s worth noticing that these most unreal forms are forms with a very real political stake- questions of lived experience and political freedom are profoundly felt.

Dorothy- It brings up the question of how important mainstreaming is. David Bowie wears sequins and glitter- he’s performing onstage, while our gender performance is our life.

Amy- Central to the performance is the erasure of the original body. We’re never asked how Bowie got to the stage- it’s part of what we’re asked to forget. He’s opening up a space where it’s possible, but never something the real body should continue. It relates to the question of sexuality. I’m curious about whose sexuality is being foregrounded- Bowie’s or the audience’s? What desire is the forefront of our attention? None of that is looked at.

Ellen- The nature of desire is complex- we can’t say for sure if either of these show a desire for sexual gratification. There’s desire in opera, but it’s not physiological- it’s identity-solidifying or identity-gratifying, very complicated.

Amy-It’s similar in glam rock- Bowie didn’t perform naked, there is a gender masking, and either/or, a body part that evokes mystery. The voice is so clearly related to the body, so central to performance.

Ellen- Theorized through Freud’s notion of fetishization. I’m not sure it’s fully satisfactory, as desire is not necessarily thought of in terms of sexual pleasure. Auslander isn’t really interested in exploring what’s going on. The neglect of music as a performance form is conspicuous in this. This book is methodologically thin, but it was hailed as an object worthy of performance studies attention.

Dorothy- It’s a common critique of popular music studies- kind of a middle ground between journalism, personal essay and history, methodology taken from whatever field the person came from originally.

And with that, we run out of time!