LIBRETTO FILMFORUM 2019 NDR

The aim of the following study is to analyze the manner in which opera music influenced film and became a crucial building block of certain cinematic narratives, in such films as Jonathan Demme’s Philadephia (USA, 1993), Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (France, 1997) and Liliana Cavani’s Il portiere di notte/The Night Porter (Italy, 1974). By revealing the correspondence between these audiovisual mediums and examining the common language used by them we intent to reveal numerous facets of this symbiotic relationship, all put in the service of lending meaning to the film, thus making the viewer’s escapist adventure truly unique.

Italian prima donna Francesca Cuzzoni (ca. 1698-1770) was the first internationally recognized virtuosa to sing high soprano women's roles. Although her work served as a model to the female performers who followed, no in-depth critical study has been written about her groundbreaking career on the opera stage of the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she was the celebrated prima donna from 1723 to 1728. During her tenure, the Royal Academy became one of the most important opera companies in Europe, rivaling those of the Viennese court, the Paris Opera, and the Italian opera houses of Naples and Venice. Her arrival on the London stage signaled a shift in the ways composers set roles in relationship to vocal categories and gender. In particular, Cuzzoni's superior virtuosic vocal abilities influenced and inspired German George Friedrich Handel's (1685-1759) compositional style and his musical treatment of dramatic elements. Cuzzoni's 1723 London debut as Teofane in his Ottone caused a sensation, establishing her professional reputation "as the greatest soprano England had ever heard." 1 Upon her successful debut, she was offered a contract for the next two seasons. Cuzzoni's triumph boosted the theatre's prestige, enabling its managers to steeply raise ticket prices by her second performance. 2 Eyewitness accounts of Cuzzoni's performances and descriptions of her voice attest to her artistry. One audience member named Mrs. Pendarve remarked after hearing her in Handel's Alessandro (1726) that "my senses were ravished with harmony." 3 Claudia Rene Wier is a lyric soprano who sang professionally for seven years with the City Opera Theatre in Regensburg, Germany. In 2008 she completed an internship, with certification, in opera pedagogy at the Unter den Linden opera outreach program in Berlin, Germany, funded by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst. She holds an M.A. in Theatre, an M.M. in vocal performance, and an M.F.A. in Drama/Theatre for the Young. She is currently an adjunct lecturer for voice and articulation and for a course in drama and play in human experience at Eastern Michigan University in the Communications, Media & Theatre Arts Department. She also teaches private singing lessons and directs the Drama Club at Slauson Middle School in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In 2012 we published the first English-language edition of Didaskalia. We now present the second issue, containing a selection of texts printed in our magazine between 2011-2013. The articles and interviews chosen for publication present the key phenomena in Polish theater, as well as the current academic interests and methodological approaches to theater history and today’s theater in contemporary theater studies. We begin with texts that deal with the reinterpretation of the Jerzy Grotowski’s work. Grotowski, Women, and Homosexuals: Marginal Notes to the “Human Drama” might be seen as an extension of Agata Adamiecka-Sitek’s reflections on gender in Grotowski’s theater contained in the “The Gender of the Performer” (co-written by Weronika Szczawińska), found in the previous English-language issue. This time the critic analyzes Apocalypsis cum figuris (chiefly based on the recording of the performance), demonstrating the dramatization of the misogynist discourse of psychoanalysis and male homosexuality in the play. This work polemicizes with interpretations to date, and serves as a point of departure for discussions on Grotowski’s work and the methodology of researching the history of theater contained in Adamiecka-Sitek’s correspondence with Leszek Kolankiewicz. In the following part we publish texts dealing with the issue of “negative performativity,” which appeared in Didaskalia in the context of works by Judith Halberstam and Bojana Kunst. Joanna Jopek transplants this concept in the context of Polish visual and performative art by Oskar Dawicki, Joanna Rajkowska, and Cezary Bodzianowski, indicating the anti-political, critical potential of failure that it contains. An important point of reference in her study is a pair of interviews with Oskar Dawicki. In these conversations the author less illuminates the process of making the film Perfomer (devoted to his work) than gives extremely different responses to the same questions, continuing his game with the image of the artist. Part Three, on the other hand, is entirely devoted to new Polish theater, though it closely corresponds with the issues raised in the preceding sections. In the article “Embarrassing Performances by Losers: Counterhistories of Political Theater,” Marcin Kościelniak focuses on counterhistory theater projects, putting forward the thesis that they “are most insightful in our day in realizing the postulates of political art and are creating the most fascinating and vital movement in Polish theater.” Isolating three models of writing counterhistories for stage, the author analyzes projects by duos of dramaturgs and directors: Paweł Demirski and Monika Strzępka, Jolanta Janiczak and Wiktor Rubin, and Marcin Cecko and Krzysztof Garbaczewski. His theoretical reflections are supplemented by a conversation with Justyna Wasilewska on her work on the title role in Marcin Cecko and Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s Balladyna. The subject of creating the image of the artist returns in two more texts, where it is shifted into media discourse and its impact on the reception of art. In her article “Covered/Uncovered: Memory Games in the Promised Theater” Małgorzata Dziewulska examines promotional strategies in theaters and the media discourse that accompanied two chronologically remote premieres: Jerzy Jarocki’s Dream of the Sinless of 1979 and Krzysztof Warlikowski’s (A)pollonia of 2009. She points out that the discrepancy between the advertisements for the performances before the premiere and the final form of the plays affected the content of the reviews, and ultimately modified the plays themselves. Monika Kwaśniewska, in turn, analyzes Jan Klata’s strategies of self-depiction, tracing his statements in the media. Kwaśniewska wonders what happened to make Klata (presently the director of the National Stary Theater in Krakow) the face of the new political theater, thereafter evolving into the “specialist on Polishness,” an “expert” on national issues. The subject of the texts in the final section is the phenomenon of the choir in contemporary theater. The texts by Ewa Guderian-Czaplińska and Agata Łuksza on two projects by Marta Górnicka at the Theater Institute in Warsaw – [‘hu:r kobj+] (“[ˈkɔːrəs əv wɪmən]”) (a play made with amateurs, dealing with the place of women in culture) and Requiemmachine (a performance that uses pieces by Władysław Broniewski to comment on the neo-liberal labor model) – are summed up by a conversation with the artist. In the interview “I Sing the Body Electric” Marta Górnicka speaks of the concept of the choir, created by individuals. She calls the language in her play a kind of speech cleansed of psychology, recalling the sound of a computer or a machine. The director relates the process of creating a choir, and the work in creating a new actor/performer through training sessions during rehearsals. The motif of the theatrical chorus branches out into various themes, lending itself to feminist, historical, political, and aesthetic reflections, concerning the phenomenon of musicality in the theater.

2012

Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you.

Conference paper, 2019

Vacis-will share their ideas about the topics of enquiry via presentations, performances, masterclasses, round tables and audiovisual materials. The Conference structure includes two main areas of investigation-which, in turn, include theories of textual composition and practices of textual composition; theories of performance creation, or "writing for the stage", and practices of "writing for the stage". The concepts of "text" and "stage-writing" can both have different meanings, thus requiring further specifications. By "textual composition" we understand not only play-texts, but also multiple literary as well as other verbal types of languages. Examples include texts derived from improvisation; performance-"scripts"; materials used in documentary theatre; the Dramaturg's contributions, which enable the text to shift between author, director, actors and audience. By "stage-writing" we understand that stage processes can become a writing system of their own, involving all theatrical elements. The notion applies to theatre direction as well as to avant-garde and contemporary performance art, where non-linguistic features can be afforded semiotic value, adding to the theatrical language.

XXVII International Film and Media Studies Conference Retuning the Screen. Sound Methods and the Aural Dimension of Film & Media History XVIII MAGIS International Film and Media Studies Spring School Living in the Material World: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Past and Present Media Ecologies

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (RAEI), 2021

Alicante Journal of English Studies / Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (RAEI) is published biannually by the University of Alicante’s Department of English Studies. Since its creation in 1988, its aim has been to provide a forum for debate and an outlet for research involving all aspects of English studies, particularly in those areas of knowledge encompassing linguistic, literary and cultural studies of the English-speaking world. The journal, available online and in paper, is open to original and unpublished articles and book reviews, which can be submitted all year long and must be drafted in English. This is a Special Issue on Theatre and Performance Studies in English.

Opera Quarterly, 2018

Scholars have long sought to trace the ancestry of film music in the music-theatrical genres that preceded the cinematic medium. Two lineages of influence predominate. On the one hand, opera served as an aesthetic ideal to which filmmakers and critics aspired, in cinema’s early decades. On the other, pantomime and melodrama provided practical models of musical accompaniment that guaranteed quintessentially filmic forms of audio-visual synchronization. Yet at the level of individual scores, the distinctions between these two genealogies become blurred; and the notion of film evolving from preceding genres remains unquestioned. This article re-examines this historiographical tendency, making a case study of Carlo Graziani-Walter’s specially-composed score for _Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei_ (1913), a major historical epic from the “Golden Years” of Italian cinema. Graziani-Walter’s score, I argue, is clearly influenced by Italian opera—especially in three key scenes, which were to be accompanied by live singing. Operatic aesthetics are notably absent, however, in the two published extracts from the score, both of which draw on popular idioms. The juxtaposition and tension between opposing styles—between the operatic and the popular—in the score to _Gli ultimi giorni_ suggests that a new, distinctly filmic form of music was already emerging.

Studia Dramatica, 2018

The paper presents the history of Romanian theatre, beginning with the creation of the first Romanian itinerant theatre company, at the middle of the 18 th century, to the present. It is intended as a foreword and a chronological framework to this special issue of Studia Dramatica. The year 2018 is the centenary of the union of Transylvania, Banat, as well as of Bessarabia and North Bukovina with the Kingdom of Romania. The " Great Union " at the end of the First World War, as known in Romanian historiography, crowned the Romanians' movements of national and cultural emancipation from the ward of the Habsburg Monarchy (followed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire), of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, movements initiated in the second half of the 18 th century and intensified in the 19 th. Given the celebration of the centenary of the Great Union, we intend to dedicate an issue of the journal Studia Dramatica to Romanian theatre, which we seek to revisit not only festively, but also critically. The history of Romanian theatre is slightly longer than one century: the first Romanian itinerant theatre company was created by several Transylvanian students, from Blaj, at the middle of the 18 th century, the century of the first attempts to create dramatic texts in Romanian. The first theatre shows in Romanian, in Moldavia and Wallachia, were performed in