Opera in Flux: Identity, Staging, Narrative

Saturday 10.3-10.10.20 9:00 AM
 
Event Start 9:00AM EST 
 
This virtual conference on October 3 and October 10, features presentations by fifteen scholars whose essays on contemporary opera will be published in a collection of essays entitled Opera in Flux: Staging, Identity, Narrative (University of Michigan Press, Forthcoming). The event is sponsored by UIC’s Creative Activity Award. Our contributors offer expertise in interpretation of contemporary opera from a multitude of perspectives, including musicology, theatre studies, gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, composition, music theory, ethnography, and performance studies.
 
Opera is in a state of flux, redefining itself with each premiere and production of radical new work. In the past two decades alone, its subject matter has expanded to include pressing sociopolitical issues and experiences, such as a condemned man’s time on death row (Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, 2000), the wrongful conviction of black and Latinx youths (Anthony Davis’s Central Park Five, 2019), drug trafficking in Mexico (Camelia la Tejana’s ¡Unicamente La Verdad!, 2014), the mass firing of gay workers during the McCarthy era (Gregory Spears’s Fellow Travelers, 2018), and the coming-of-age story of a transgender woman (Laura Kaminsky’s As One, 2014).
 
 
 

Please register for the conference before October 1st, 2020, by writing to the organizer,

Yayoi Everett (yeverett@uic.edu).

Program Schedule: 

October 3rd (Saturday, 9AM-2:30PM EST)

 

Introduction (9:00AM-9:15AM): Yayoi Everett and Nick Stevens

 

Session 1 (9:15-10:45AM): Posthumanism and the Anthropocene (moderator, Nick Stevens)

Megan Steigerwald Ille, “Opera for the Anthropocene: Automobility, Urban Space, andThe Industry’s Hopscotch”

Nicholas D. Stevens, “Fear of an Envoiced Planet: Singing Hyperobjects in (Post)operas of the Climate Crisis”

Jelena Novak, “Opera Beyond Human: Vocaloids, Mixed Realities, and Singing Machines”

 

Session 2 (11:00-12:15PM) Documentary, Testimonials (moderator, Joy Calico)

Ryan Ebright, “Steve Reich’s The Cave, Documentary Theater, and the Testimonial Turn in American Opera”

Amy Bauer, “¡Unicamente La Verdad!: Camelia la Tejana’s Many Truths”

 

Lunch break (12:15-1PM)

 

Session 3 (1PM-2:30PM) Variable Staging and Dramaturgy (moderator, Myron Elliott)

Alexander K. Rothe, “Gesture and Dramaturgy of the Avatar in George Lewis’s Afterword”

Joy H. Calico, “Modes of Engagement with Experimental Opera: Czernowin’s Infinite Now as Case Study” 

Nancy Yunhwa Rao, “Inter-Asia Sensibility—Tan Dun’s Tea: A Mirror of Soul”

 

October 10th (Saturday, 9AM-2:15PM EST)

 

Session 4 (9AM-10:15AM) Feminist Writing, Voice (moderator, Yayoi Everett)

Colleen Renihan, “Of Sense and Sirens: Ana Sokolovic’s Svadba Wedding”

Liisamaija Hautsolo,“Unspoken feminism: Kaija Saariaho’s monodrama Émilie”

 

Session 5 (10:30-12PM) Narrative and Self (moderator, Louis Bergonzi)

Edward Venn, “Narratives of the Self in Thomas Hyde’s That Man Stephen Ward 

John Clum, “‘There’s Something About That Fellow, Wrong’: Gregory Spears’ Operas of Queer Outsiders”

Yayoi U. Everett, “ Narrative Agencies in Annie Proulx and Charles Wourinen’s The Brokeback Mountain (2014)”

 

Lunch break (12:00-12:30PM)

 

Session 6 (12:30-1:45PM) Irony, Subjectivity, Dream(moderator, Nick Stevens)

Cecilia Livingston, “Show and Tell: Operatic Ironies in Written on Skin”

Mauro Bertola, “The Uncanny Realism of Dreams Subjectivity and Oneiricism in Salvatore Sciarrino’s Musical Theatre”

 

Final Debriefing (1:45PM-2:15PM)