The Diva's Fans: Opera and bodily participation

Abstract

In this essay, I discuss what I see as one of the main characteristics of opera as a live art form: the very special relationship between a performing singer and a perceiving listener/spectator. I ask in what way the fascination with the live event and its effects can be replaced, or even produced, by mediatized forms of operatic performances. I focus on the possibilities of documenting and even intensifying one of the central ingredients of opera as a live art form: the special relationship between singer and audience member, the active perception of a singer's voice in performance. I focus on the distribution of single scenes, arias, or simply moments of live performances on YouTube from DVD's or pirates, extracted and filmed by fans, making them available to fellow fans worldwide and commenting on them, thus creating a kind of documentation and mediatized transformation of one of the essentials of live performance: the active participation, the chatting and talking, the discourse.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the conferences ‘Beyond Opera: Staging Theatricality’ (Stony Brook University and Yale University, April 2010), ‘The Praxes of Theory’ (University of Chicago, May 2010), ‘Cultures of Modernity’ (IFTR World Congress, LMU Munich, July 2010) and ‘Liveness’ (Freie Universität Berlin, August 2010).

Notes

¹ It is obvious that the imagination plays an important role in this bodily process of perceiving and resonating, sometimes forgotten by phenomonological and performative approaches to theatre. It would be worthwile thinking further about this relation between participation and imagination.

² www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFOEISUIXeM (accessed 3 June 2011).

³ www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=fFOEISUIXeM (accessed 3 June 2011).

⁴ www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=DeJzZ0lUnIo (accessed 3 June 2011).

⁵ See Barthes 1975, Koestenbaum 1993 or Abel 1996. See also Susan Sontag's famous claim for the ‘erotics of Art’ in her essay ‘Against Interpretation’ from 1964.

⁶ www.youtube.com/watch?v=rppj4LyucSw (especially from 3:28 to 5:30, accessed 3 June 2011).

⁷ www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGRfVynf0GM (accessed 3 June 2011).

⁸ www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz4SVfkBOtY and www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LB1ZAesEAk (accessed 3 June 2011).

⁹ It is symptomatic that the two books that deal with the bodily reactions to singing begin with the biographies of the authors (Koestenbaum 1993, Abel 1996).