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Opera Indigene: Re/presenting first nations and indigenous cultures.
No full textThe representation of non-Western cultures in opera has long been a focus of critical inquiry. Within this field, the diverse relationships between opera and First Nations and Indigenous cultures, however, have received far less attention. Opera Indigene takes this subject as its focus, addressing the changing historical depictions of Indigenous cultures in opera and the more contemporary practices of Indigenous and First Nations artists. The use of re/presenting in the title signals an important distinction between how representations of Indigenous identity have been constructed in operatic history and how Indigenous artists have more recently utilized opera as an interface to present and develop their cultural practices.
This volume explores how operas on Indigenous subjects reflect the evolving relationships between Indigenous peoples, the colonizing forces of imperial power, and forms of internal colonization in developing nation-states. Drawing upon postcolonial theory, ethnomusicology, cultural geography and critical discourses on nationalism and multiculturalism, the collection brings together experts on opera and music in Canada, the Americas and Australia in a stimulating comparative study of operatic re/presentation
Performativity, mimesis, and indigenous opera
No full textThis chapter begins with the possibility that opera scholars and anthropologists have become collaborators. Those drawn to view, hear, compose, perform in, and study opera often do so for all its powers of imagination and expression—musically, mythically, linguistically, theatrically—while the study of the functions, customs, and belief systems of diverse peoples have entered into something of a crisis in recent decades. As this collection appears within a series devoted to interdisciplinary explorations of opera, I hope here to disclose my own misgivings about the relationship of my discipline of performance studies to opera analysis.
To account very briefly for the discipline’s history, in the latter half of the twentieth century a branch of the discipline of anthropology was renamed “cultural studies,” but not before two eminent North American scholars—Richard Schechner and Victor Turner—decided that there was a productive category to emerge from their dialogue between theater and anthropology (to paraphrase one of Schechner’s works).1 The 1980s offspring of that dialogue is now called “performance studies.”
As the name suggests, the remit in discussing any aspect of “performance” is broad, but the methodology still belongs to the ethnographic fieldwork designed to analyze ritual, and can borrow from associated disciplines such as sociology and psychology. Terms such as “performativity” and “agency” began to relate both to the ceremonial and symbolic qualities of ritual and to the
socio-political and psychological transformation possible for individuals and communities through a wide range of performing arts. So when this approach is added to the harsh social inequalities to emerge from colonial histories, in the form of postcolonialism, theater scholars and musicologists alike have a complexity of choice in their methods for discussing this very specific topic of opera and Indigenous cultures.
I want you, the reader, to be guided through the material in this chapter by a fan of the Western operatic canon, but also by an Australian whose voice is from a Greek-speaking background. I am sympathetic to the postcolonial condition of having origins that are off-center in relation to the Anglophone empire along the burdensome “Greekness” of the concept of mimesis—which, in Platonic terms, means both to “imitate” and to “represent”—something at the very heart of musical and dramatic characterization in opera. Only recently have audiences and scholars appreciated how much Indigenous cultures can theorize mimesis in terms that recognize the postcolonial condition, in terms that break down an “us and them” ethnographic version of cultural difference. This is most evident in the work of Michael Taussig in the USA and Marcia Langton in Australia (whose scholarship on Australian Aboriginal mimesis in contemporary media is most relevant to this chapter). So while the content of this chapter will survey some key operas composed by Australians and New Zealanders since the early twentieth century, it will argue in relation to these works that the staging of “character” could no longer ignore the reality of being Aboriginal or Māori in these societies.
While there will be the inevitable theoretical tangents, as “acting” in opera begins to unravel, by the end of this chapter I hope you might conclude, along with me, that as Indigenous communities engage with and develop cultural practice through opera (even as Western definitions of opera are destabilized in the process), these moments both transform opera as a genre and extend cultural expression for those cultures
Introduction
No full textAt the 2005 Talking Stick Festival, an annual event that showcases Indigenous Performance in Vancouver, Canada, the Tsimshian/Cree performance artist Skeena Reece, offered a perspective on the developing performance traditions of First Nations song:
I figure in like a hundred years our songs are just gonna sound real different … .
They’re probably gonna sound something like this:
Reece begins to sing what sounds like a traditional song with vocables, but performs it with full operatic bravura and excessive vibrato. She concludes the aria with a rising arpeggio, ending on a high note that causes her eyes to roll up toward the back of her head. It is a parody of operatic singing at its best. Thunderous cheers and laughter erupt from audience.
What? Come on, that’s not a good thing, man. That’s not good—how’re we supposed to dance to that?
Any written transcription of Reece’s routine, be it textual or musical, cannot convey the full extent of absurdity in her adaptation of traditional singing, nor the ebullient response of the largely First Nations audience in attendance. The worlds of Indigenous cultural traditions and opera would seem to be diametrically opposed in a large majority of their aspects including performance style, participation, venue, and cultural function. In Reece’s parody we see the worlds of opera and First Nations song come together as questionable partners. Yet the conjunction of these worlds has historically been much more common in an international context than one would expect, and has often resulted in productive exchange and the reciprocal growth of both traditions. In striking contrast to what Reece and her audience hear as the incongruous pairing of cultural traditions and operatic practice, there is both a long history of operas that represent First Peoples and a lesser-known history of opera by First Peoples used to express and re-assess cultural traditions. The chapters contained within this volume explore the range of incongruities, synchronicities, and alliances between indigenous cultural practices and operatic traditions. While the representation of non-Western cultures and otherness in opera has long been a focus for critical inquiry, the diverse relationships between opera and First Nations and Indigenous cultures have received far less attention. Opera Indigene takes these relationships as a focus, a dressing the changing historical depictions of Indigenous cultures in opera and the more contemporary uses and adaptations of the form by Indigenous and First Nations artists. The “re/presenting” of our title thus signals an important distinction between how non-Indigenous artists have represented the Indigene in opera3 and how Indigenous artists have more recently utilized opera as an interface to present and extend cultural practices
The Threepenny Opera:Performativity and the Brechtian Presence Between Music and Theatre
No full textThe article investigates how the theories of Bertolt Brecht mainly about the reflection an audiences is supposed undertake during a performance, coincides with the actual situation of experience, using a historical analysis of the opening night of the Threepenny Opera as the case
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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