September 30, 2010 - Why Theatre? with Tereza Havelkova: Staging Liveness in Hypermedial Opera

As Philip Auslander (1999) has famously argued, the live is historically and discursively dependent on the mediatized, and “like liveness itself, the desire for live experiences is a product of mediatization” (55). Auslander emphasizes the similarities between live and mediatized performances, for he is mainly intent on refuting the claim that the former are ontologically different from the latter. As our cultural economy remains invested in the perceived difference between the live and the mediatized, however, I rather consider it imperative to ask how this difference is constructed, and to what ends. In other words, if live performance cannot serve as a privileged site of resistance to the economy of reproduction because it is always already a part of it, what role does the continued valorization of liveness play within this economy? What cultural values and expectations does the “desire for liveness” sustain?
My discussion of these issues will revolve around Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway’s opera Writing to Vermeer (1999), where the difference between liveness and mediatization is skillfully constructed within an overall context of hypermediacy. I will concentrate, in particular, on the relationship between liveness, cultural constructions of femininity, and the singing voice.

Tereza Havelkova is Assistant Professor in the Department of Musicology at Charles University in Prague and a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation, entitled “Opera as Hypermedium,” is a theoretical inquiry into contemporary encounters of opera and media. Her work has appeared in publications such as Sonic Mediations (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2008) and Inside Knowledge (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009). She is also the founder of a Czech journal for contemporary music called His Voice.