The Potential of New Technologies for Transformations of Lyric Theatre
Opera director and multi-media artist Tim Hopkins was appointed AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts with CROMT for a five-year period, commencing June 2007. Tim is undertaking research relating to a number of projects investigating the potential of new technologies and media for lyric theatre. The projects include multi-media performance, interactive installation, and adaptations for the small screen.
LES NOCES
Les Noces is a multi-media adaptation of Stravinsky's ballet-cantata of 1923. Tim is working with the Russian vocal group The Prokovsky Ensemble and the composer Lena Langer in association with the Royal Opera Genesis project to explore musical, visual and theatrical material for the project.
Full Project Plan
AHRC FELLOWSHIP IN THE CREATIVE AND PERFORMING ARTS - TIM HOPKINS
The use of new technologies in lyric theatre, in relation to intermedial mise-en- scene in theatrical staging, and the remediation of operatic media.
Aims and objectives
Communication technologies based on the principle of digital signal processing permit new forms of exchange between different expressive media, such as sound and image. In this project I aim to explore some opportunities this may present for what I define as lyric theatre. I argue that new technologies offer new ways of making lyric theatre, in terms of how it is made, who can make it, and how and where work is experienced by audiences.
I will investigate how new technologies can challenge and extend the traditional forms of opera as the proto-typical form of lyric theatre, reinvigorating its historic ambition to create lyric relationships between the expressive media of space and time, sound, image, singing and performance. However, traditional forms of opera embody hierarchical structures in both creation and performance. My aim is explore how intermedial exchanges offered by digital technology might challenge these hierarchies.
For example, devices which translate sound into image in real-time, whereby a musician can direct a visual outcome, or a visual artist a musical one, have clear potential for extending the intermedial relations of opera. Such relationships confront models of authority at work in traditional opera performance, since, in theory, the functions of conductor, singers, orchestra, scenic context etc can be reassigned across all the participants.
This challenge is extended by the potential for new media to overcome boundaries of time and space. The traditional aesthetics of opera are a function of the evolving technology of the theatre. Opera's conventional time-space constituents, such as proscenium arch, the orchestra pit, the audience sharing a single point of view, enshrine specific metaphysical assumptions (e.g at Wagner's Bayreuth). New opera houses, such as Valencia (2005) perpetuate these time-space relations. However, new media create spaces that offer alternative time-space paradigms for lyric theatre, e.g. where audiovisual connection via the web allows for exchange between different sites, performers and audiences.
This tension between technological potential and traditional operatic paradigms is my central concern. My objective is to explore it from three perspectives, engaging my practice as both an interpretive artist and author of new forms of lyric theatre.
- the reconfiguration of intermedial mise-en-scene in theatrical contexts;
- the remediation of lyric theatre into non-theatrical technological environments such as the web;
- the exploration of intermedial relationships in hybrid contexts that mix live and mediated performance, real time and non-real time, immediate and remote space.
This will involve using specific digital applications to evolve real-time relationships between sound, image and performance, in particular dramaturgical contexts. Private experimental investigation will lead to development of three performance works, each referencing opera, that elaborate a range of intermedial relationships relevant to the issues above.
Through ongoing contact with practitioners researching related areas, I will debate issues arising from the work: via networking and presentation, a website dedicated to the research, and contact with dedicated academic and professional contexts.
Research Questions
1. How can new technologies allow the hierarchical media-relations of conventional opera to be re-configured to new expressive and communicative ends?
2. How do new technologies allow the expressive and communicative energies of lyric theatre to be translated into new environments such as the web?
3. How do new technologies allow new relations to be made between the conventional time-space constituents of lyric theatre?
Research Context
My questions arise from a number of contexts: my own experience of using media technologies within lyric theatre; developments in related fields; and wider social reflection on technological transformation. They also relate to issues arising from my 2002-4 Nesta Fellowship award for artistic development.
Opera is arguably the most virtuosic form of theatrical collaboration, working at the limits of the media of theatre. My approach as a director/designer/deviser is based on an audience's capacity to absorb information in real time and space. This involves a notion of 'lyric space,' conceived as a point of tension between abstraction and concreteness, a mobile beacon by which an audience navigates itself through the different modes in play: space against sound, presence against absence, completeness against suspense, in light, colour, movement, music, singing, etc. The choices made across these media constitute the voice of the production. Any technological intervention in opera has to negotiate with this existing 'intermedial' activity, whether the result is theatre-based work or the export of opera material to a different environment.
My use of intermedial mise-en-scene began with a production of Judith Weir's opera Blond Eckbert, (English National Opera, 1994) integrating live performance with 35mm film, shadow-play and diorama. This layering of media was a metaphor for underlying crisis in the narrative. In The Forest Murmurs (Opera North, 2001,) I turned to creating original work using intermediality itself as a thematic metaphor, in a work using singers, chorus, orchestra, original and archive film and sound, describing the evolution of the Romantic imagination. This became the subject of academic debate, (F. Chapple, "Digital Opera: intermediality, remediation and education" in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, Manchester 2002) which introduced me to the potential of theoretical research contexts for my artistic concerns. Other important theoretical contexts for my work include Bolter and Grusin's concept of "remediation" in Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 2000), and Manovich's The Language of New Media (MIT, 2002), both of which place new medial relations within historical understandings of mediality.
Both of the theatre works described relied on moving image technologies delivering events at fixed rates over time, in tension with the flexible temporality of live performance. Other works in this mode include Reich/Korot's Three Tales (2002) and Viola/Sellars' Tristan und Isolde (Paris, 2005.) However, recent audio-visual translation devices, and web-based communication, break though these frameworks. This is a vast practice and research area, including artists with whom I have worked/consulted such as Tom Betts (whose Pixelmap translates sound into projected imagery in real-time), and Derek Richards (using digital media for telematic performance between remote sites.) Elephant and Castle (Aldeburgh Festival/LAP 2007) is a collaboration between myself, DJ Mira Calix, composer Tansy Davies and architect Pippa Nissen, using audiovisual technology to connect audiences at the Aldeburgh Festival and a Shopping Centre in London, to explore contrasting space.
Current projects (Channel 4 Mozart Lovers, broadcast/webcast; Royal Opera Owen Wingrave), have confirmed the importance placed by cultural institutions on the medial potential now offered by new technologies. But they can only undertake research into this sparingly. As well as an opportunity to engage with academic and artistic research contexts, the Fellowship will offer a sustained opportunity to address this professional context. It will demand fundamental development across the range of disciplines that comprise my practice: research, authorship, direction, design, film and moving image, and performance.
Research Methods
To answer my research questions I need to engage particular types of digital media in contexts that illuminate a range of intermedial and dramaturgical potentials. My research methods involve a progress from studio investigation, through the exploration of ideas in practical workshops with performers and relevant technological equipment, to fully realised projects.
Initial studio-based research will employ digital tools, building on previous experience with sound/image translation devices MaxMsp/Jitter and Isadora, to create intermedial relationships between recordings or my own performance of work by Stravinsky, Mozart and Sullivan, and visual material e.g. archive stills, animated diagramming of the sound world, and video capture of performance. The diverse choice of composers allows me to frame a range of inter-related research issues in different creative contexts. The work of these artists has been a recurring presence in my artistic development, with its dynamic between traditional practice and innovation.
From this initial research three new lyric theatre pieces, based on particular works by the composers, will be developed, each addressing one of the research questions and inter-related issues. Since audience relation to the work is a crucial aspect of the research, the works will be shown publicly.
Project 1. Les Noces
Stravinsky's Le Noces (1923) conveys an ambivalent perception of technological transformation. It depicts how a peasant wedding ritual mediates individual desires in favour of a group, through strategies that subvert traditional intermedial lyric theatre relations: text sung by a chorus from the orchestra pit, ballet stressing gravity not weightlessness, orchestration conceived for 4 onstage pianolas.
This project takes Stravinsky's deconstruction of hierarchical relations as a thematic starting point for the evolution of a series of 10 minute 'chapters', linked to form a performance work. These chapters would investigate different intermedial models, reconfiguring hierarchical relationships between constituents of lyric theatre: dancer, singer, pianist, conductor, scenic artist. Different strategies would be explored: each chapter might retell the same narrative, or exchange roles between performers - a dancer conducting from the pit, a pianist enacting ritual movement. This would be extended through technological intervention: translation devices producing image from sound, intermedial relationships between new media devices and devices they appear to replace.
This project sees Stravinsky's work as he saw the peasant wedding, as a ritualised artistic object that has become 'historic'; as material that can be reconfigured through technological transformation.
The outcome could be presented as a complete work, or as complement to Stravinsky's ballet, and assumes a traditional concert hall or theatre, as familiar contexts subjected to disruption.
Project 2. Opera on the small screen
To address question 2 I propose to import historic operatic material into a non-theatrical technological environment. The intention is to create a context to explore how qualities of operatic singing and performance physicality can translate into a non-theatrical space, such as a gallery piece, web-site object, or broadcast TV. It moves away from two existing models: the reportage-style relay of live stage performance, and expensive narrative fiction film. It proposes instead that opera experienced on screen should create a visible boundary of possibility against which the presence and virtuosity of the performer can register for the viewer.
Through rehearsal, 4 singers will be trained to combine two activities simultaneously: the dance technique Contact Improvisation (stressing physical communication and spatial eloquence) and basic camcorder operation. The aim is to produce a single image comprised of four images from the singers' cameras, each obliged to deliver their story, driven by their interpretation of the musico-dramatic text, presented together in real time. This process is intended to generate a series of real-time events in a single space towards a small screen outcome that would be a function of performance, not a report of one. Further development could offer viewers choices between different interpretations, to reform the lyric relationships themselves.
Provisionally, the musical material would be the quartet from Mozart's opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail. This has been chosen as a starting point, because a) its content relates to the task, as it depicts quarrelling emotional perspectives b) it comes from a work in the mixed theatrical mode of Singspiel, c) its has a formal status as the longest single ensemble in Mozart's oeuvre.
Project 3. The Lost Chord
To address question 3, I aim to develop a performance event that disrupts the conventional time-space constituents of lyric theatre through technology. This would decontextualise proscenium spectacle and divert its elements into other modes, e.g. an immersive, installation-type experience. It would introduce real-time web-technology elements and physical computing (motion sensors configured to drive sound or video,) to extend time-space relations and intermedial activity.
The starting point would be experimental remediations of Sullivan's The Lost Chord. Sullivan has been chosen because, although he has come to represent an idea of obsolete creativity, his song The Lost Chord is a powerful image of transcendental intermedial connection that became popular through Edison recordings. His fascination with new electromechanical communication media, e.g. the telephone, evokes an ambivalence in Victorian responses to technological transformation, resonating with my central enquiry.
At this point, I envisage an arts centre infrastructure, where different presentation paradigms exist under one roof. Audiovisual links
would exchange status between spaces: exhibition areas hosting performance; exterior spaces assuming artistic consequence. Core operatic constituents could be reassigned: eg the role of conductor dispersed among different media drivers (such as performer motion;) embedding an operatic chorus in an audience; accessing remote performance via web technology.
These suspensions of function aim to place the audience in an ambivalent relation to time and space. I want to explore this thematically, exploring the potential of remediation for reframing historic material, creating new lyric theatre work that can infer / reveal lost content, and enliven or question our sense of the past and present.
Give Me Your Blessing for I go to a Foreign Land
A multimedia adventure about love in era of technological change.
CROMT Research Fellow Tim Hopkins works with Russian-born composer Elena Langer and members of the Moscow based Prokrovsky Ensemble on a piece inspired by Stravinsky's 1923 ballet-cantata Les Noces (from which the title is taken).
The work combines live music for piano, voices, violin and folk percussion, dance for folk and ballet performers, moving image, historical technologies, and online virtual space. The score incorporates fragments of music by Wagner, Lyadov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Stravinsky himself.
Two public performances of a workshop version of the piece took place at the Clore Studio, Royal Opera House, in February 2009.