The Power of Images in Performance: Josef Svoboda’s Scenography for Intolleranza 1960 at Boston Opera Company
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| Year of publication | 2011 |
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| Description | In 1965 the Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda and Sarah Caldwell, the leading American conductor and opera director, worked on a contemporary operatic work, Intolleranza 1960 by Luigi Nono, in Boston Opera Company. With its unprecedented use of images, this production introduced a new form of theatrical representation strikingly different from conventional opera and drama performances. The key to the visuality of the performance rested in the presence of different kinds of projected images in combination with the stage action of protagonists – or, at times, in the stark contrast of the absence of such images. The production also included several moments, when images on stage functioned as a mirror and, with minimal delay, showed the action taking place on and off stage and, according to Svoboda’s testimony and reviews, also the action taking place in the audience. In my analysis of the visual component of Intolleranza 1960 in Boston, I want to show that the projected images represented the defining elements of the scenic composition: they were so expressive and significant that they often suppressed the action of the performers, traditionally considered as the central component of theatrical performance. As the centre of the audience’s attention shifted from the actor and his action to the images, a new ‘visual’ narrative was developed. The shift in performance strategies, as promoted in Intolleranza 1960 in Boston, resonates with a paradigm shift, the so-called ‘pictorial turn,’ proposed by the prominent American theorist of media and visual culture W. J. T. Mitchell. |
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