Art lyrique et art numerique, a propos d'une scenographie virtuelle interactive de Norma de Bellini (review)

Art lyrique et art numérique(Lyric Art and Computer Art) is a collection of essays delivered at a colloquium on the occasion of the performance, at the L'Ile d'Yeu citadel off the French coast, of Bellini's Normain a scenography by Alain Bonardi in August 2001. Bonardi integrated an interactive projection into the backdrop of the stage, allowing the actors/singers to react to the changing images in the background, all the while changing the sequences of images in real time as well (see <http://www.computeropera.com>—in French only). The interaction being limited to the performers, the project clearly added an extra dimension to the already complex interplay of musical, dramatic, architectural, choreographic and scenographic elements every modern opera includes.

Seven essays have been reproduced in this A4 photocopied brochure, four of which are worth reading. Mark Reaney from Kansas University gives an overview of the experimental works done in Kansas (his is the only text in English; very short and rather insufficient summaries in English of the other papers are included in the brochure). Serge Lemouton, from the Opera de la Bastille in Paris, explains how Philippe Manoury has integrated computer music in his opera K. . . , after Kafka's novel The Process. Vincent Barthe, the director of Normain the L'Ile d'Yeu production, comments on the musical challenges a contemporary performance of this classic opera poses. Finally and most interestingly, Francis Rousseau and Alain Bonardi from IRCAM and the Université Paris VIII, respectively, give a full analysis of the function of the arriere-plan, or backdrop, in the opera. Starting from a comment on a passage from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountainand guided by the adventures of Orpheus in Monteverdi's Orfeo(1607), they analyze the function of the backdrop as an artificial personification of otherness. Replacing traditional stage machinery by interactive projections, the artificial intelligence of the software becomes a form of "artificial otherness." The question, according to the authors, is whether the information technology will withstand a Turing Beauty Test, using "Is it beautiful?" rather than "Is it intelligent?" to distinguish between artificial and human. Their answer is, tentatively, that the opera (still) needs the human performer to fulfill its promise.