Rehearsing New Opera: An Ethnographic Lens on Becoming Posthuman
While moments of performance have often taken centre stage in scholarship on contemporary operatic practice, this thesis conceptualises new opera as rehearsal. With accounts of entire rehearsal phases, I shift the focus to the development process of world premiere productions in Europe to sound out the wider agential networks at play. Rehearsal ethnography functions as a method to further demystify operatic performance, decanonise scholarly approaches to the academic field and diversify access to current practices. Evolving with schedules and studios, as well as with computational technologies, biological matter and production teams, new operas undergo a process of ‘becoming’ from composition to staging which negotiates relationships beyond human life. From posthumous opera divas and futuristic avatars to fungal networks, operatic stories narrate the recalibration of congenital bodies and their processes rehearse posthuman existence within anthropocentric operatic structures. Taking on a posthumanist lens as a tool to navigate through rehearsal practices, I map the sonic agencies of new opera at the intersection of opera studies, critical posthumanism and ethnography. My attention towards posthuman dynamics of space, time, repetition and failure provides insights into three widely discussed operas which disrupt canonical rehearsal practices: *7 Deaths of Maria Callas* (Bayerische Staatsoper, 2020), *Upload* (Dutch National Opera, 2021) and *Like Flesh* (Ircam and Opéra de Lille, 2022). The operatic homage of performance artist Marina Abramović in honour of Maria Callas raises questions about difference in operatic repetition, reconfigures ideas of musical authorship and fosters intermundane collaboration. In the opera production *Upload*, composer, librettist and director Michel van der Aa explores the affordances of a virtual avatar within a laboratory-like studio, reorganising more-than-human sounds and evolving himself into the posthuman form of a rehearsal process. Looking into the recording and rehearsal stages of Sivan Eldar and Cordelia Lynn’s eco-themed opera *Like Flesh*, I confront the post-anthropocentric display of eco-sensitive narratives with material trajectories and antifungal production practices. The examined cases function to expand the academic discourse on operatic afterlives by scrutinising new opera as rehearsal, entangled in the probing of protean posthuman ‘becoming’.
Contemporary Opera, Critical Posthumanism, Eco-Musicology, Emerging Technologies, Ethnomusicology, Music Theatre Studies, Musiology, New Materialism, Opera Studies, Queer Ecologies, Rehearsal Ethnography, Rehearsal Studies
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