ABSTRACT

Staging Voice is a unique approach to the aesthetics of voice and its staging in performance.

This study reflects on what it would mean to take opera’s decisive attribute—voice—as the foundation of its staged performance. The book thinks of staging through the medium of voice. It is a nuances exploration, which brings together scholarly and directorial interpretations, and engages in detail with less frequently performed works of major and influential 20th-century artists—Erik Satie, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill—as well as exposes readers to an innovative experimental work of Evelyn Ficarra and Valerie Whittington. The study is intertwined throughout with the author’s staging of the works accessible online.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in voice studies, opera, music theatre, musicology, directing, performance studies, practice-based research, theatre, visual art, stage design, and cultural studies.

chapter |28 pages

Introduction

Directing opera, staging voice

chapter 1|27 pages

Staging a vulnerable voice

Weill and Brecht's Der Jasager (1930)

chapter 2|25 pages

Binding the voice

Ficarra and Whittington's The Empress's Feet (1995)

chapter 3|34 pages

Staging thought in Satie's Socrate (1919)