Blog Post #8 (Justin): No Exit - Creating Blind Spots in Don Giovanni

To be transported by performance requires a certain blind spot on the part of an audience – to forget that one is seated in an auditorium surrounded by other spectators, bearing witness to a fiction which suddenly transforms into a seemingly real event. Cavell wishes us to understand that through this change we are not within the presence of the actors, but made to be a part of the actors’ characters’ present. Essentially, this notion of transport informed Richard Wagner’s attempts to minimize the aesthetic distance between audience members and the performed spectacle. By hiding the orchestra in a pit in front of the stage, turning off the house lights over the audience, and pushing for a ‘natural’ acting style, Wagner’s ‘Artwork of the Future’ aimed to make the audience forget the ‘staged’ nature of the performance and to be transported into the event. This was a rather lofty goal for the German producer/creator of such an ‘unsettled’ artform as opera (which points to a certain level of hubris within that particular artist).

Taking ‘transport’ as a product of this aforementioned blind spot, IU’s production of Don Giovanni poses a challenge for identifying clear moments when such occurrences might take place. The enormous mirrors in the back of the set reflect back not only the world of the stage, but also the world of the audience with its many human bodies and faces, bright neon green exit signs marking potential avenues for audience escape, as well as large lighting instruments typically meant to be hidden from view as they create the illumination necessary for a view to be possible. The characters’ present is difficult to isolate as my own present, as spectator, is constantly being reflected back at me. Oddly, the most theatricalized moment in the production, Don Giovanni’s descent into hell, served for me as the production’s most successful moment of transport. As the mouth to hell (the perfectly square trap within the stage floor) gaped open, the ample fog billowing forth masked the reflections of the omnipresent mirrors, hiding their reflected images of ‘stagecraft’ and ‘stage space’ from view. As the music swelled and the opera’s chorus sang at its fullest volume, the aesthetic distance between myself and the stage suddenly diminished. I was no longer witnessing the audience witness the production, but was observing a moment unfettered by reminders of the stage. The fog blinded me from those elements which were not allowing me to be transported into the event.