Vocality as / in Composition solo and collaborative creation of new postopera works (PhD Thesis) - Figures

ABSTRACT:

As a contemporary opera singer-composer, director-producer, and filmmaker, my artistic research has yielded a new body of solo and collaborative postopera works in live and mediatised forms. My creative work and compositional methods are centred in an embodied vocal practice and the exploration of a multi-layered meaning-making process. My theoretical frame includes discourses surrounding contemporary music-theatre practices that deconstruct and challenge traditional Western operatic forms by favouring mediatised works, an abandonment of narrative drama, and an embrace of inventive, often experimental, performance methods. My practice has led me to investigate theoretical landscapes that include the work of musicologist and performance studies scholar Jelena Novak, theatre researcher Hans-Thies Lehmann, mid 20th-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the Bulgarian-French philosopher, cultural theorist, and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva, and Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero. In practical application, I am committed to the distribution and sharing of versioned forms of creative work, and my creative, theoretical, and practical means may be particularly relevant to other creator-producers.