Sharing the sorrow: operatic acting in contemporary production of baroque opera - Händel's Alcina
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper focuses on operatic acting, especially cognition, and emotions and their sharing between actor and spectator. In opera, scenography is also an essential part of the expression of the actor-singer. Scenography is currently understood as an audiovisual or multimodal component of the production. In opera, it is often a very active correlate of the acting. Music, which in the process of meaning-making is understood as the dominant agent in communicating affects and emotions, also fundamentally shapes both the spectator's scenographic imagery and everything communicated by the singer's acting. Using the example of the Baroque opera Alcina by G. F. Händel in the current Brno production (2022, directed by J. Heřman), I will show the means by which the singer-actress communicates her character's feelings. I focus on sorrow and despair shared with the spectators in her/his embodied perception of the scenographic environment – induced by the "anxiety" of Baroque music and its visualization. I will focus on the lamentation aria performed by the leading Czech singer-actress P. Vykopalová. It is worth mentioning that the Brno opera and acting school still draws on the work of K. S. Stanislavski's Opera Studio, although it has already drawn on other influences. Given the complexity of opera production, I am led to combine several theoretical and methodological approaches in my analysis, including the Conceptual Metaphor and Blending Theories (see, e.g., Pérez-Sobrino 2018; Antović 2022). |
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