Another quick plug

For those interested in Matthias Rebstock and my co-edited book Composed Theatre. Aesthetics. Practices. Processes but found it a bit too pricey to add to their personal bookshelf, you may be interested to know that it is now out as a paperback (£29.95) and as an ebook on most platforms starting as low as £4.19 (Kobo) to £9.99 (ibook) or £13.99 (kindle).

The Legacy of Opera – hot off the press

A chapter I wrote a while ago is now finally 'out there': it appears in the new volume:

The Legacy of Opera – Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance (edited by Dominic Symonds and Pamela Karantonis)
In my chapter Dancing in the Twilight – On the Borders of Music and the Scenic I investigate the complex interaction of music and theatre, musical and theatrical performance and perception and particularly the dissolution of clearly definable borders between them on the basis of two different practices: a meta-musical-theatre film (Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark), and an experimental music-theatre production by composer-director Heiner Goebbels: Eraritjaritjaka. The methodological considerations that precede these investigations are based on Jens Schröter's notion of transformational intermediality and expand the idea of an intermedial relation that "consists in one medium representing another” into three types of relations, which I label with the metaphors “Suchbild” (picture puzzle), the “Kippfigur” (tilting phenomenon) and the “Schwellenphänomen” (liminal phenomenon). In my argument these notions are used to classify and distinguish different forms of cohesion or fusion between music and theatre in performance. I focus on productions which challenge or blur boundaries of clearly distinguishable media, genres and/or performance modes. They also question fixed dispositions with respect to both production process and perception and draw their particular appeal from this ambiguity.

More details on the book:
Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York, NY 2013. 269 pp. (Themes in Theatre 7)
ISBN: 978-90-420-3691-8 Paper
ISBN: 978-94-012-0950-2 E-Book

ISBN: 978-90-420-3692-5 Textbook

Online book series info: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?SerieId=TT

The Legacy of Opera: Reading Music Theatre as Experience and Performance is the first volume in a series of books compiled by the Music Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. The series explores the widening of the meaning of the term “music theatre” to reflect new ways of thinking about this creative practice beyond the genres circumscribed by discourses of theatre studies and musicology. Specifically it interrogates the experience of music theatre and its performance energies for contemporary audiences who engage with the emergence of new expressive idioms, new performative paradigms, new technologies and new ways of thinking. The Legacy of Opera considers some of the ways in which opera’s influence has informed our understanding of and approach to the musical stage, from the multiple perspectives of the ideological, historical, corporeal and artistic. With contributions from international scholars in music theatre, its chapters explore both canonic and experimental examples of music theatre, spanning a period from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of illustrations
• Dominic Symonds and Pamela Karantonis: Empty houses, booming voices
• Bianca Michaels: Is this still opera? Media operas as productive provocations
• Nicholas Till: A new glimmer of light: Opera, metaphysics and mimesis
• Sarah Nancy: The singing body in the Tragédie Lyrique of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France: Voice, theatre, speech, pleasure
• Clemens Risi: Performing affect in seventeenth-century opera: Process, reception, transgression
• Magnus Tessing Schneider: The Violettas of Patti, Muzio and Callas: Style, interpretation and the question of legacy
• Pamela Karantonis: The tenor in decline? Narratives of nostalgia and the performativity of the operatic tenor
• Michael Eigtved: The Threepenny Opera: Performativity and the Brechtian presence between music and theatre
• Jeongwon Joe: The acousmêtre on stage and screen: The power of the bodiless voice
• David Roesner: Dancing in the twilight: On the borders of music and the scenic
• Pieter Verstraete: Turkish post-migrant “opera” in Europe: A socio-historical perspective on aurality
• Dominic Symonds: “Powerful spirit”: Notes on some practice as research
• Abstracts
• Notes on contributors
• Bibliography
• Index 

I hope the book will enjoy many critical readers!

Here is where we meet...

I have recently had the fortune to work more closely together with Pablo Pakula, who organised the 'Lifting the Curtain' events at the Marlowe Theatre (see previous blog entry), is a colleague at University of Kent, Drama and also Co-Founder of Accidental Collective together with Daisy Orton. Their current project is an exciting devised piece on the basis of John Berger's evocative book Here is where we meet.
I am delighted that after a number of conversations I am now involved in creating the music/soundscape for this piece together with Jenna Wild. Doing some hands on work, thinking music-dramaturgically alongside a developing piece, helping to solve issues of pace, transitions, mood, rhythm etc. is something I always find very exciting and working practically is an itch I don't always find the time to scratch amidst the demands of a busy academic schedule.
I am thus looking forward to the next few weeks: if you are in the area of Canterbury, don't miss the show: it is at the Marlowe Theatre, June 18-22.

You can also follow Accidental Collective on Twitter: @accidentalc

Workshop at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury

I had a lovely time today giving a workshop at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. This was part of a three day festival of talks, demonstrations, workshops and other activities of drama colleagues at the University of Kent seeking to make some of what we do accessible, interesting and relevant to a wider audience: Lifting the Curtain was the fitting title.

My workshop was entitled
Music as Performance – Theatre with Instruments
and the abstract read as follows:
This workshop will explore the potential that instruments can have on stage, and the act of ‘musicking’ as a mode of performance. Music can be theatrical and theatre can have musicality. Mainstream theatre productions like Sweeney Todd and avantgarde artists like John Cage, Laurie Anderson, or Heiner Goebbels, have all set precedents for this kind of work. We will engage in improvisations, exploring new playing techniques, placement in space and use of light to unleash theatrical expressiveness and narrative from musical instruments. Please bring your instrument(s), if you have any (you don’t have to be particularly good on them!) or come along without one. No experience required.

About 20 participants took part, some students, some theatre practitioners, opera singers, teachers, composers. We set out to undertake a range of experiments and improvisations, isolating very small basic aspects of musical and instrumental performance on the theatre stage. What make an instrument a theatrical object? What gestures or encounters with other bodies on stage change a musicians performance? How? Into what?
I was keen not to provide recipes or quick tricks on "how to...", but to get us all see and hear more acutely, notice small differences and think more about the interdependence of instrument and performer, space, light, movement etc. and the narrative, atmospheric, visual, sonic etc. potential they unfold.

There were already some good comments on twitter (#curtainupkent) - more comments and suggestions welcome!

(Photos (c) Matt Wilson)

A 12min video documentation filmed by Käroli Grenman and edited by Peter John-Morton (many thanks!)

Peer review

The peer review system, which many publishers, including my prospective publisher Ashgate, use to ensure and increase the quality of their publications, is in many ways an excellent process. When it comes to your own manuscript, you do await the anonymous peer reviewer's comments with quite a bit of anxiety. This is likely to be the most critical reader you book will get, they are usually a respected expert in your field, and their verdict can create a lot of extra work or even cause a publisher to withdraw from a project.
So it was with great relief when I read the first sentence of the peer review for "Musicality in Theatre" which I had submitted in January:
"I very much enjoyed reading the manuscript, and think it will be an excellent publication"
Phew.
He or she then goes on to make a range of quite detailed suggestions for improving the manuscript, all of which I can understand and find helpful and constructive.
So now I am looking forward to rewriting certain chapters with this fresh and critical perspective in mind and hope to resubmit soon.   

A Review for Composed Theatre

A colleague very kindly forwarded Jackie Smart's review of Composed Theatre by Matthias Rebstock and me to me today. The review is hot off the press and appears in the latest issue of Theatre Research International (Volume 38 / Issue 01 / March 2013, pp 74 -75).

Jackie Smart writes:

"This book investigates a field of performance that operates between music and theatre, examining ways in which compositional principles drawn from music have been applied to theatrical performance, and theatrical thinking has influenced musical composition. It arises from two symposia organized by the editors at Exeter and Hildesheim universities which brought together academics and practitioners, and this starting point is reflected in the composition of the book through the way it brings together a diverse range of voices and perspectives, appropriately conveying the sense of scholars and artists engaged in ongoing debate about a developing form.

[…] The practitioners represented in Part Two constitute an impressive list, including Heiner Goebbels, Michael Hirsch, Jörg Laue, George Rodosthenous and Nicholas Till. Their engaging accounts illuminate the theoretical arguments of Part One and extend the book’s relevance and interest to anyone concerned with the messy, fascinating processes of collaborative creation. The ‘portraits’ of practitioners in Part Three bring into focus the key role of the performer as a creative contributor and highlight the presence of the personal within composed theatre, from the ‘biographical origins’ of Ruedi Häusermann’s inspiration to Daniel Ott’s interest in working with the personalities of his musicians. Part Four contains an intriguing selection of excerpts of discussions from the symposia and a concluding discourse analysis by Roesner in which he draws out and interrogates key principles and themes of this fascinating form of theatre-making. It is a style of performance of which I have had little direct experience but the book made me want to hear and see more."

Always great to read that someone enjoyed the book, found it engaging and useful – made my day!

Submission!

Last week I summoned my courage and gathered all the 'this will have to be good enough' attitude I could muster have made the final arrangements for submitting the manuscript to the publisher, Ashgate.
I am always amazed how time-consuming the final nitty-gritty layout, proofreading and harmonising is, but at some point even this minute and slightly numbing process is done, and it was time to let go. Not an easy process: one could of course continue working on a manuscript for ever, as there will always be a bit of new information, another reference, a new insight, another typo. So taking a conscious decision to stop fiddling is important.
Still, it is not quite the 'drumroll'-moment, the big finale with glitter and fanfare one secretly envisages throughout the process of writing, given that there will now be a relatively lengthy process of peer reviews, amendments, copy-editing, proofreading, chasing final publication rights for illustrations etc. etc. But despite all this, there is no denying that this project has reached an important milestone, and although I felt having to print all 474 pages was a bit unusual in our digital age, the sheer physical weight of the envelope I sent off brought this home to me quite nicely.