New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera

Jingyi Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Harvard University. As a music and cultural historian, her research interests center on themes of racial identity, mobility, media technology, and decolonial thinking in 19th to 21st century songs, opera, and theater.

Opera is a living art that has undergone constant transformation over the course of over four centuries of history. Those transformations encompass shifts in modes of composition, adaptation, staging, performance, and patronage that have been well documented by music historians. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the emergent practices that are revitalizing the operatic stage today, particularly from the standpoint of practitioners. New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera brilliantly steps into the breach by bringing together some of the world’s most innovative librettists, composers, directors, producers, and dramaturgs to reflect critically and creatively on their work. Jeffrey Schnapp, founder and director, metaLAB (at) HarvardAs opera ponders new forms of address and explores non-traditional venues it also becomes a borderland between performers and their audiences but also a meeting place for the ever more porous areas of theory and practice. New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera chronicles this rapprochement all the while redefining contemporary opera as a cross-cultural genre.Giorgio Biancorosso, editor of Sound Stage ScreenIf two decades ago opera was unsettled and programmatically unsettling, in Zhang’s ingenious collection opera is an expanded field of cultural politics, unavoidably enmeshed with decolonial interventions and public spaces, with the imaginary politics of hypermobility, with the all-pervading sense of civic responsibility of any creative effort. ‘Dramaturgy’ then serves as a device that mobilizes a deeply felt engagement with the politics of creative practices, and with the necessary hybridizations and recontextualizations of the bodies of opera, in their overdetermined historicity. The essays collected here testify to the wealth of critical labours entailed by the creative process of 21th-century composers and producers, librettists, dramaturgs, and scholars – of their intense engagement with opera’s institutionality and cultural politics.Alessandra Campana, Tufts University

• About the ContributorsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Contemporary Opera and New DramaturgiesJINGYI ZHANGPART I: New Dramaturgical Considerations1. Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative: The First Ten YearsKELLEY ROURKE2. Interview with Beth MorrisonBETH MORRISON AND JINGYI ZHANG3. Seeking the Philosopher’s Stone: On the Alchemy of Time in Creative DramaturgyDAVID T. LITTLEPART II: Representing Non-Western Cultures and Perspectives4. Musicalizing the World: Dramaturgical Considerations of Non-European Culture in Contemporary OperaKAMALA SANKARAM5. Investigating Operatic Decolonization in the Hypermobility Turn: The Industry's Sweet Land (2020) JINGYI ZHANG6. Interview with Du YunDU YUN AND JINGYI ZHANGPART III: Site-Specific Dramaturgies7. Landscape Dramaturgy and (Post)Opera: Singing after PerspectiveJELENA NOVAK8. Pastoral Paradox: Staging Ted Hearne’s Farming (2023) and Kate Soper’s The Hunt (2023)ASHLEY KELLY TATA9. Interview with Pamela ZPAMELA Z AND JINGYI ZHANGPART IV: Creative Possibilities of Transmedia Dramaturgy10. Tradition, Transmedia, and Music in Contemporary Japanese Performing ArtsKRISZTINA ROSNER11. Biometrics, AI, Embodiment, Performative Practices, and the New DramaturgyELLEN PEARLMAN12. Interview with Noa FrenkelNOA FRENKEL AND JINGYI ZHANG