New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera

Rezensionen / Stimmen

Opera is a living art that has undergone constant transformation over the course of over four centuries of history. Those transformations encompass shifts in modes of composition, adaptation, staging, performance, and patronage that have been well documented by music historians. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the emergent practices that are revitalizing the operatic stage today, particularly from the standpoint of practitioners. New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera brilliantly steps into the breach by bringing together some of the world's most innovative librettists, composers, directors, producers, and dramaturgs to reflect critically and creatively on their work.

Jeffrey Schnapp, founder and director, metaLAB (at) Harvard

As opera ponders new forms of address and explores non-traditional venues it also becomes a borderland between performers and their audiences but also a meeting place for the ever more porous areas of theory and practice. New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera chronicles this rapprochement all the while redefining contemporary opera as a cross-cultural genre.

Giorgio Biancorosso, editor of Sound Stage Screen

If two decades ago opera was unsettled and programmatically unsettling, in Zhang's ingenious collection opera is an expanded field of cultural politics, unavoidably enmeshed with decolonial interventions and public spaces, with the imaginary politics of hypermobility, with the all-pervading sense of civic responsibility of any creative effort. 'Dramaturgy' then serves as a device that mobilizes a deeply felt engagement with the politics of creative practices, and with the necessary hybridizations and recontextualizations of the bodies of opera, in their overdetermined historicity. The essays collected here testify to the wealth of critical labours entailed by the creative process of 21th-century composers and producers, librettists, dramaturgs, and scholars - of their intense engagement with opera's institutionality and cultural politics.

Alessandra Campana, Tufts University