Considering Calamity: Methods for Performance Research.; The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies

• Published in: Cambridge opera journal 2009-03, Vol.21 (1), p.89
• Main Authors: Hicks, Jonathan, Ben-Zvi, Davis, Linda, Tracy C, Davis, Tracy C
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anatomical systems; Anthologies; Cultural identity; Discipline; Embodiment; Essays; French language; Geertz, Clifford (1926-2006); Music; Musicology; Opera; Perceptions; Reasoning; Studies
• ISSN: 0954-5867; 1474-0621
• DOI: 10.1017/S0954586709990097

Amelia Jones, for example, bemoans the fact that '[u]ntil the 1990s, the discipline of art history ... refused to acknowledge the crucial role of the body in the production and reception of works of art'.28 Jones's chapter (though overly reliant on denigrating 'modernists' and 'formalists') is a significant attempt to historicise '[t]he suppression or erasure of the live or inhabited body in institutionalized versions of art discourse and in art institutions'.29 Largely thanks to the art history-savvy Richard Leppert, musicologists and those in opera studies are already aware of such concerns.30 Moving from art history to dance studies, Susan Leigh Foster's chapter in the Companion begins engrossingly by asking 'what do you feel, physically, when you watch another body performing?'31 Leigh Foster goes on to 'emphasize the sensations of our bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and joints', justifying her focus by claiming that, 'for those of us in dance studies', 'the sensory experience provided by these corporeal elements ... [is] a predominant aspect of aesthetic experience'.32 No doubt she is right, and, as Elizabeth Le Guin and others have demonstrated, corporeal sensation is an aspect of musical experience whether or not dancing is involved.33 As such, Leigh Foster's chapter, which considers embodied perception in both cultural and physiological terms, would make an excellent point of departure for a study of kinaesthesia in the audition of opera. According to this line of reasoning, there may well be situations in which operatic strategies provide that structure or resource. [...]this application of specialist aesthetic knowledge in the course of cultural or ethnographic research seems to be exactly what Geertz was calling for in an essay that mulls over the widespread use of '[t]he drama analogy for social life'. The sort of realignment described above - from composers to performers, from works to performances - is all well and good, but imagine, for comparison, if an 'interpretative turn' in French musicology had the net result of shining the spotlight on interprètes ('performers' en français) without fully engaging the other implications of interpretation. Since the study of opera and/as performance seems here to stay, now is a good time to explore the detours (and dead-ends) of opera studies and/as performance studies. 1 Carolyn Abbate, 'Music - Drastic or Gnostic?' Critical Inquiry, 30 (Spring 2004), 536.