New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera
The Practitioners’ Perspectives
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:16th Sep '24
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera is the first and only book that approaches the dramaturgy of contemporary opera from the unique perspectives of living practitioners (composers, librettists, directors, producers, singers, dramaturgs, and administrators) who provide valuable first-hand insight into the coming into being of an opera today.
The edited collection captures the ethos of contemporary opera-making in the global context and serves as a timely intervention in addressing the array of heterogenous dramaturgical practices that go into making an opera today in an era of flux. The collection is split into four parts: Part I presents the new dramaturgical considerations that the field is currently exploring; Part II investigates the ways in which non-Western cultures and perspectives can and have been represented; Part III explores the roles of space, nature, and environment in contemporary opera; and finally, Part IV looks at the ways in which technology has intersected with the creation of contemporary opera.
With perspectives from practitioners throughout, this collection is essential reading for advanced students, researchers, and scholars of contemporary opera, as well as practicing dramaturgs in this field.
Opera is a living art that has undergone constant transformation over the course of over four centuries of history. Those transformations encompass shifts in modes of composition, adaptation, staging, performance, and patronage that have been well documented by music historians. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the emergent practices that are revitalizing the operatic stage today, particularly from the standpoint of practitioners. New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera brilliantly steps into the breach by bringing together some of the world’s most innovative librettists, composers, directors, producers, and dramaturgs to reflect critically and creatively on their work.
Jeffrey Schnapp, founder and director, metaLAB (at) Harvard
As opera ponders new forms of address and explores non-traditional venues it also becomes a borderland between performers and their audiences but also a meeting place for the ever more porous areas of theory and practice. New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera chronicles this rapprochement all the while redefining contemporary opera as a cross-cultural genre.
Giorgio Biancorosso, editor of Sound Stage Screen
If two decades ago opera was unsettled and programmatically unsettling, in Zhang’s ingenious collection opera is an expanded field of cultural politics, unavoidably enmeshed with decolonial interventions and public spaces, with the imaginary politics of hypermobility, with the all-pervading sense of civic responsibility of any creative effort. ‘Dramaturgy’ then serves as a device that mobilizes a deeply felt engagement with the politics of creative practices, and with the necessary hybridizations and recontextualizations of the bodies of opera, in their overdetermined historicity. The essays collected here testify to the wealth of critical labours entailed by the creative process of 21th-century composers and producers, librettists, dramaturgs, and scholars – of their intense engagement with opera’s institutionality and cultural politics.
Alessandra Campana, Tufts University
ISBN: 9781032611570
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 400g
118 pages