CoLab - Day 1 (Monday 15th February 2021)
Every year at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance an event takes place in the spring term called ‘CoLab’. During this week, performers from every discipline at the college are invited to collaborate on a student-led performance proposal. This year I was placed in ‘The Illegal Opera’ with nineteen other performers including singers, dancers, composers and instrumentalists, such as bassoonists and clarinetists. The focus of this group was to perform new operatic works (including graphic and audio scores), explore new interpretations of traditional operatic works and to create our own compositions on subject matter that was infrequently considered by composers.
When we selected our preferred projects in November, ‘The Illegal Opera’ was to take place in person as a socially distanced group. Facing CoLab in the third national lockdown meant that all twenty of us would now be working online from home, in which some of the group were living abroad. As this was my first CoLab project, I couldn’t visualise how the project was going to work online, but as performers we have constantly adapted during the Covid-19 pandemic and I was optimistic that we would adapt ‘The Illegal Opera’ to an online setting.
To begin the week, we were invited to join a meditative immersive vocal class run by performance artist and composer, Alwynne Pritchard. Whilst I have been training myself to meditate since the beginning of 2021, this was a new experience for me as we were encouraged to explore our voices during the session. We were encouraged to play with the range, dynamic and articulation possibilities of the voice. Whilst it was unlike any meditative session I have ever taken part in, it opened up an array of possibilities in conjunction with work on graphic scores and audio scores, that would require imaginative vocal interpretations.
After the meditative immersive vocal class, we agreed to regroup at 1pm and presented poems on less commonly explored subjects in opera. The poems included: ‘Addiction’ (Rupi Kaur), ‘Garden of Eden’ (Tracy K. Smith) and ‘Caged Bird’ (Maya Angelou), which led onto discussions on topics ranging from sexual assault to racism. Despite new operas being ‘continually composed and premiered throughout the twentieth century, opera as a practice had become artistically and institutionally conservative, invested in a core repertoire spanning from Mozart to Puccini’(1). Whilst there is a wealth of beauty and drama in this core repertoire, we agreed that some of the repertoire is highly problematic and that we should explore these areas further.
In preparation for ‘The Illegal Opera’, the singers were asked to prepare arias or duets from the core repertoire that we had identified as problematic. I brought two arias to the session. The first was Zerlina’s aria ‘Batti, batti' from Don Giovanni, in which Zerlina asks ‘her lover to beat her up as a way of reassuring him that she still loves him, having gone willingly into an illicit affair that turned out badly’(2). The second was Violetta’s aria ‘Addio del passato’ from La traviata, in which she knows she is dying and afterwards she urges Alfredo ‘to find happiness with a pure young woman while she will be praying for them both in heaven’(3).
I was placed into a group with Kirsty Clapperton, a contemporary dance student and Laura Marquino Falguera, a postgraduate harpist. We agreed that as another group had proposed the duet ‘Là ci darem la mano’ from Don Giovanni, we would present the aria from La traviata to explore a different topic. I have seen three different productions of La traviata and each time she has been presented as ‘a fallen woman who earns redemption through sacrifice’(4). Her sacrifice is often glorified and yet, the society shame and judgment that leads to a woman dying in solitude is forgotten. At the end of the session, we agreed that we wanted to explore the horror of the situation, rather than glorify her sacrifice. We agreed to do our own research on the aria and re-convene with ideas the following day.
References
Emily Richmond Pollock, Opera after the zero hour (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 1.
Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Mary Hunter and Gretchen A. Wheelock, ‘Staging Mozart’s Women’, in Siren Songs: Representations of gender and sexuality in opera, ed. Mary Ann Smart (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000), 47.
René Weis, The Real Traviata: The song of Marie Duplessis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3.
Betsy Schwarm, ‘La traviata’, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/La-traviata/> (accessed 6 March 2021).