Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body

Jelena Novak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317077190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Opera Music

Both in opera studies and in most operatic works, the singing body is often taken for granted. In Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, Jelena Novak reintroduces an awareness of the physicality of the singing body to opera studies. Arguing that the voice-body relationship itself is a producer of meaning, she furthermore posits this relationship as one of the major driving forces in recent opera. She takes as her focus six contemporary operas - La Belle et la Bête (Philip Glass), Writing to Vermeer (Louis Andriessen, Peter Greenaway), Three Tales (Steve Reich, Beryl Korot), One (Michel van der Aa), Homeland (Laurie Anderson), and La Commedia (Louis Andriessen, Hal Hartley) - which she terms 'postoperas'. These pieces are sites for creative exploration, where the boundaries of the opera world are stretched. Central to this is the impact of new media, a de-synchronization between image and sound, or a redefinition of body-voice-gender relationships. Novak dissects the singing body as a set of rules, protocols, effects, and strategies. That dissection shows how the singing body acts within the world of opera, what interventions it makes, and how it constitutes opera's meanings.

PART I
Focusing on Body Singing

Chapter 1
Postopera and Vocalic Body

In 2003 I attended a performance of Michel van der Aa’s opera One (2002), which has only one singer on the stage. Soprano Barbara Hannigan, looking identical to her life-size two-dimensional video, confronts the representation of herself throughout the piece: a projected singing body and a live singing body represent each other, and their mutual representations are at the same time complementary and deconstructive. Despite the mimetic relationship between a live performing body and its video double, the live and the projected images were always clearly distinguishable. In the sphere of sound/music, however, it was sometimes difficult to detect what was live singing and what was pre-recorded sound projected on stage. The impossibility of clearly distinguishing the pre-recorded from the live voice makes the relationship between the two fluctuating and dynamic, and the same goes for the relationship between the voice and the body, since the conventional forms of their mutual representation change significantly. The result is extremely virtuosic singing because the physical body “competes” with the machine, whose performance goes beyond the physical capabilities of a performing human body. That relationship between body and machine creates a kind of vocal “alloy” consisting of live and pre-recorded components. Such a vocal result “outgrows” the performing body: since the body singing live is not sufficient to produce the vocal result that Van der Aa envisaged, the technologically enhanced voice appears beyond the physical limits and capacity of the vocal apparatus of the singing body.

Two relations are questioned in One simultaneously: between the singing body and its voice, and between the live performer and its projected double. The discrepancy between what is seen and heard appeared significantly different from that usually experienced in Western conventional operatic repertoire. The singer’s body produces a voice on stage in One, and the singing body is at the same time determined by the voice in a virtuous overlapping of projected and live performed sounds and images. A specific perception of the singing body is provoked, one that Steven Connor designates as the vocalic body, or voice-body: “a surrogate or secondary body, a projection of a new way of having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the autonomous operations of the voice.”¹ The individual, expressive, self-reflexive body performs, while at the same time it is performed by the voice. I read One as a strong critique of the common relationship between body and voice in conventional opera, where it often appears to be the “blind spot,” or pre-determined convention. By reinventing the body–voice relationship that constitutes the core of the opera as we know it, Van der Aa at the same time reinvents the opera and our understanding of it. As such, One is exemplary for both the subject of this book—singing body and its reinvention—and for my own object of analysis, which I define as a distinctive field: the postopera.

My main argument is that the body–voice relationship establishes meanings produced by opera and that furthermore it becomes one of the major driving forces in recent opera. As such this relationship should be considered when opera is analyzed. I investigate the reinvention of the body–voice relationship in works by some of the most acclaimed and intriguing contemporary music theatre authors such as Van der Aa, Laurie Anderson, Louis Andriessen, Philip Glass, Peter Greenaway, Hal Hartley, Beryl Korot, and Steve Reich. In their own way, pieces chosen for analysis raise questions and propose answers concerning the reinvention of mutual relationship between body and voice (vocalic body) in recent operatic practice.

The reinvention in question assumes the changes that came as the result of the impact of new media, a de-synchronization between image and sound, or a redefinition of sex–gender–voice relationships in opera. I also examine the ways in which the relationship between the singing body and the voice is considered in theory.

By showing how the singing body constitutes opera’s meanings I intend to achieve four aims:

• extend the cultural analysis of opera to the singing body;

• identify the theme of mutual interaction between the singing body and the voice in opera as a site in which different discourses are encoded;

• enrich the field of opera studies with a body/voice theory; and

• define the concept of postopera, thus creating a theoretical context and common “scene” for analyzed pieces.

These four aims constitute at the same time a major contribution of this book towards opera studies.

Defining Postopera: History of the Term

Since postopera is my object of analysis, and since I introduce it as a theoretical concept, it is necessary to at least provisionally position it here. With the term postopera I reply to a wide range of operatic practices that have appeared in Western musical theatre since the last quarter of the twentieth century, practices for which the use of the notion of opera becomes somewhat inadequate. I will now explain how I came to this notion of postopera and why, and in Chapter 2 I will elaborate on its meanings further.

I first used the word postopera during my research project Opera in the Age of Media.² This I did for two reasons, the first practical and the second theoretical. The practical reason was that as a technical term, the notion of postopera facilitated the process of writing. I felt that the term opera was no longer adequate when I was writing about recent pieces by authors such as Glass, Andriessen, Reich, Van der Aa or John Adams. The term opera became somewhat old-fashioned and unfit to refer to all kinds of conceptual and media changes that those pieces demonstrated in comparison to conventional opera repertoire. I felt uneasy when qualifying those pieces as operas and that uneasiness made me constantly add some explanations when using the word opera for them: for example, non-conventional, contemporary, postmodern. I used these descriptions in order to distinguish conventional operatic repertoire from unconventional recent contemporary practices. However, those additions made me feel that my text was “stuttering” each time I had to use the term opera. Something was wrong: my theoretical objects were asking to be defined more in accordance with their features, and I needed a practical solution for that problem.

The solution came with the notion of postopera inspired by the title used by Jeremy Tambling.³ It liberated my text from “stuttering.” It designated unconventional contemporary operatic pieces in which the relationship between music and drama is reinvented, and the impact of new media to the opera world is significant. The theoretical reason why I used the term postopera was that as a theoretical concept it made me rethink recent opera in the light of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theatre in order to situate it on a larger map of contemporary theatre practices.⁴

In this book I reintroduce the notion of postopera for two reasons: 1) because I believe that it is productive and necessary to make a more profound comparison with the theoretical field of postdramatic theatre defined by Hans-Thies Lehmann in order to maintain the opposition between conventional “dramatic” opera and postdramatic operatic practices, and 2) because I understand the notion of postopera not only as postmodern opera, as was the case with the notion of post-operatic introduced by Nicholas Till, but also as postdramatic opera, and those differences need clarification.⁵ As I will elaborate in more detail in Chapter 2, for Till post-operatic is a kind of synonym for postmodern opera. He does not connect post-operatic with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theatre. As a point of differentiation I find Lehmann’s concept of great importance for understanding the changes that happened in a number of recent operas. Alluding to some emblematic theoretical foundations of opera studies—Opera and Drama by Richard Wagner⁶ and Opera as Drama by Joseph Kerman⁷—I will discuss what I call “opera after drama” or “opera beyond drama,” postopera: that is, opera which is postdramatic and postmodern at the same time.

The Vocalic Body and Ventriloquism

The practice of reinventing the body–voice relationship in opera was introduced to me by One, and Connor’s concept of a vocalic body attracted my interest in theorizing that relationship. The concept of the vocalic body, or voice-body as Connor also designates it, interrogates the understanding of a relationship between body and voice. As is usually understood, the body produces the voice. The concept of the vocalic body emphasizes not only that their inversion is possible, but that it happens all the time. It emphasizes the reversibility of the mutual influences between body and voice: “The principle of the vocalic body is simple. Voices are produced by bodies, but can also themselves produce bodies.”⁸ I perceive the voice-body as a kind of mirror mechanism—the voice is projected by, but also on, the body and that projection, in this case vocal performance, immediately affects the identity and the presence of the body that produced it, by reflecting itself back to it.

Slavoj Žižek’s theorization of the body–voice relationship precedes Connor’s vocalic-body concept. It exposes the problem of belonging between the voice and the body. Žižek questions the core of this relationship, describing its paradoxical mechanism: “The voice acquires a spectral autonomy, it never quite belongs to the body we see, so that even when we see a living person talking, there is always some degree of ventriloquism at work: it is as if the speaker’s own voice hollows him out and in a sense speaks ‘by itself’, through him.”⁹ Another author whose writing on voice is a major contribution to the field of voice theory, philosopher Mladen Dolar, also identifies the gap that exists between the body and the voice in general. He also claims that the voice never sounds like the person emitting it, and insists on gap, and mismatch between them.¹⁰ Dolar connects that gap with practice of ventriloquism “as if ventriloquism was the standard use of the voice that we overlook by mere habit.”¹¹

It is in disembodied voice and ventriloquism, the “practice of making voices appear to issue from elsewhere than their source,” that Connor finds this gap between body and voice that both Žižek and Dolar write about.¹² According to Connor, “the disturbing effect of ventriloquism may derive from its transcendence or disruption of seen space.”¹³ To me the effect of the ecstatic conventional operatic voice (for example in romantic operas) was precisely the one that disrupted the “seen space” often containing the motionless body of the singer. “The ventriloquial voice asks in particular to be understood in terms of the relations between vision and hearing, a relation which it itself helps to disclose,” writes Connor.¹⁴ I believe that the same principle stands for the operatic voice too.

Through theorizing ventriloquism Connor arrives at the concept of a vocalic body. Due to a questioning of the body–voice relationship on which it is based, ventriloquism is of interest to my research on the relationship between body and voice in opera. Some kind of overlooking of perception of the body–voice gap, while insisting on its performance, is common to both ventriloquism and opera. In both ventriloquism and in opera we know where the voice comes from, but most often are implicitly asked to agree that we do not. The act of the ventriloquist is usually based on the procedure of lending a human voice to the dummy, or puppet. In conventional operas, there is a...