The spectator-listeners’ participatory roles in Michel van der Aa’s stage works, Blank Out and Eight

Abstract

Disciplinary background A. From the perspective of musicology, my paper offers examples of how postopera challenges opera’s conventional communication strategy, how it activates the spectator-listener and how it brings the boundary between the genres of art and popular into question. Disciplinary background B. From the perspective of theatre studies, my paper compares postopera with postdramatic theatre. It shows how, instead of illustrating the drama, postopera’s performances create theatrical situations which stimulate the spectator-listeners’ individual processes of interpretation. Abstract My paper discusses the spectator-listeners’ participatory roles in twenty-first-century postopera. As oppose to conventional drama opera, in which the music and actions on stage primarily illustrate the written script, postopera combines various theatrical elements such as stage actions, music, film as well as verbal and visual elements, into performances without fixed meanings – thus, evoking the spectator-listeners’ individual readings. In a larger context, the involvement of spectator-listeners can be linked to the democratisation of the art world. To clarify the audience’s participatory role in postopera, I introduce Michel van der Aa’s multimedial chamber opera Blank Out (2016) and his virtual reality installation Eight (2019). Postopera is an umbrella term referring to a variety of twenty-first-century stage works which share certain aesthetic principles. They employ unconventional, often anti-temporal, means of storytelling that are familiar from film and video games. Modern audio-visual technology is employed in their realisations, wherein opera’s centuries-old tradition is abandoned: the unity of body and singing voice.