Fall 2009 Events
"Regieoper or Eurotrash? The Legacy of East German Theater Directors on the Opera Stage"
Date: Thursday, December 3
Time: 4:45 pm
Location: 107 EPB
Presenter:
Joy Calico, Associate Professor, Music, Vanderbilt University
Description of talk:
"Regieoper or Eurotrash? The Legacy of East German Theater Directors on the Opera Stage" On opening night at the Metropolitan Opera this season, Luc Bondy's new production of Tosca created a scandal the likes of which has not been seen in that venerable house in recent memory. The blogosphere was soon awash in charges of "regietheater" and "Eurotrash." Both terms are associated with a production aesthetic that may be defined as a radical staging of a canonical opera, typically either non-literal or extremely literal in interpretation. Advocates tout Regieoper (director's opera) as the most significant development in opera staging since Wagner; detractors, particularly in the United States, dismiss it as Eurotrash. All agree that it originated in Europe after 1945, and most would say that the Germans had something to do with it, but no one has adequately traced its heritage. To that end Calico makes the case that Regieoper is a legacy of East German theater culture. She interprets it as a synthesis of two schools of directorial thought cultivated in and exported from East Germany, or the GDR (German Democratic Republic): realistic music theater from the Komische Oper and defamiliarization from the Berliner Ensemble. Her presentation, which uses video clips, tracks these two strands of East German stage production, speculates about how their convergence gave rise to Regieoper, and traces those influences in the work of current provocateur directors such as Katharina Wagner, Christoph Schlingensief, and Calixto Bieito.
Talk Designed for the General Public, to Attract Audiences Interested in the Metropolitan Opera HD Transmissions, on Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier
Date: Thursday, December 4
Time: 5:30 pm
Location: UCC 2520D
Presenter: Joy Calico, Associate Professor, Music, Vanderbilt University
(Shown live at Sycamore Theatres on January, 9)
Professional bio:
Joy Haslam Calico is Associate Professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University. After completing her Ph.D. at Duke University in 1999, with a dissertation on operas by Eisler and Dessau and cultural politics in East Germany 1945-1961, she has focused her research primarily on opera, with a particular interest in radical staging practices, and on cultural politics during the Cold War. Her book Brecht at the Opera was published by the University of California Press in 2008, and she has published articles in Cambridge Opera Journal, Musical Quarterly, Opera Quarterly, Journal of Musicology, and numerous anthologies. For 2009-2010, she has been awarded an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, where she is working on a project about the performance and reception of Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in seven different European contexts in the 1950s . She has also received funding from the American Academy in Berlin, the NEH, the Howard Foundation, the DAAD, and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies.