Staging Voice by Grover-Friedlander, Michal;

Short description:

Staging Voice is a unique approach to the aesthetics of voice and its staging in performance. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in voice studies, opera, music theatre, musicology, directing, performance studies, practice-based research, theatre, visual art, stage design and cultural studies.

Long description:

Staging Voice is a unique approach to the aesthetics of voice and its staging in performance.

This study reflects on what it would mean to take opera’s decisive attribute—voice—as the foundation of its staged performance. The book thinks of staging through the medium of voice. It is a nuances exploration, which brings together scholarly and directorial interpretations, and engages in detail with less frequently performed works of major and influential 20th-century artists—Erik Satie, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill—as well as exposes readers to an innovative experimental work of Evelyn Ficarra and Valerie Whittington. The study is intertwined throughout with the author’s staging of the works accessible online.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in voice studies, opera, music theatre, musicology, directing, performance studies, practice-based research, theatre, visual art, stage design, and cultural studies.

''Staging Voice offers a revolutionary outlook on the new field of Opera Staging, positioning the ephemerality of the voice at the core of opera and of the director’s work. Written by a renowned voice scholar and opera director, the book deals with emblematic examples of vocal compositions from the 20th century. Each of the chapters exposes the critical challenges the operatic medium is faced with. Staging Voice takes the reader on an intense and poetic journey along the farthest borders of the voice: muteness, doubling, and acrobatics; it explores sinister aspects of resistance and consent; hints at that which dwells in between voice and body and what is at stake in staging myth in contemporary opera. Michal Grover-Friedlander meticulously weaves together practice-based research and theoretical reflection in an unceasing lover’s discourse with the voice.'' Michela Garda, Professor, Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage, University of Pavia

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Directing Opera

Staging Voice

Chapter 1: Staging A Vulnerable Voice: Weill and Brecht’s Der Jasager (1930)

‘Music… goes its own vast peaceful way’

Translations and Transformations

Consent

Yes and No

Yes-singing and Mute Agreement

Doubling and Muteness

Death

The Gesture

Acrobat, Measure, Distance, Scale

Chapter 2: Binding the Voice: Ficarra and Whittington’s The Empress’s Feet (1995)

A Voice for the Feet

Sleepwalking Feet

Sleepwalking Empress

Foot-binding

Castrati

Fold

Soaring Voice

Hollowed-out voice

Aerial Acrobat

Enigmatic Work

Flexible Timbre

Satie’s Plato

Marsyas

Cicadas

Swan Song

Nietzsche’s Socrates

White

Furniture Music

Respectful Silence

Restaging Socrate

Voice and Music Echoed in Staging and Set

Staging Musical Myth

Staging Socrates’s Death