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  • Minding the Gap:The Politics of the Body-Voice Relationship in Multimedia Opera
  • Tereza Havelková (bio)

The singing voice has long been a crucial issue in opera studies, and scholars have increasingly focused their attention on the relationship between voice and body, especially in the context of opera's involvement with media technology. This relationship has often been conceptualized in terms of a gap or split between the voice and the body, and the material qualities of the voice have frequently been opposed to the textual and visual aspects of opera. 1 The attention to the variously formulated gaps or splits between the body and the voice, and between the visual and the acoustic more generally, harbors an important political claim. It relates to the larger critique of the Western representational regime—a critique that has been articulated most forcefully from the position of gender theory. Within the frame of this critique, which centers around the concept of the (mastering and male) gaze, sound has been offered as an alternative to sight, and its critical powers have been emphasized with respect to not only opera but also the new media. 2

In light of these claims, multimedia opera may seem like a prime site for a new, critically informed practice—a practice, moreover, that reinvigorates a political potential that has always been there in opera. And indeed, the term "digital opera" has been proposed to describe—or rather to envision—a new type of "contemporary music- or sound-led performance that produces new operatic phenomenologies through the use of digital media." 3 According to Áine Sheil and Craig Vear, this new type of performance entails the possibility of a "critical renewal" of opera, of a rediscovery or reinterpretation of some of the "signatures of the form." 4 With respect to the relationship between voice and body more specifically, Jelena Novak has used the term "postopera" to describe contemporary works that "reinvent" the gap between voice and body that she understands as inherent to opera in general. 5 Novak evokes the trope of ventriloquism that has been used to describe the relationship between voice and body in vocal studies and opera scholarship as well as film theory, and observes, using Žižek's phrase, that the voice in opera "never quite belongs to the body we see." 6 In her analysis, the "body-voice gap" is reinvented in "postopera" in different ways, most of which involve media technology. 7 [End Page 27]

In emphasizing a split between voice and body, however, scholars like Novak risk eliding the different effects and purposes such a gap may serve. More importantly, they overlook the stakes in body-voice unity on the operatic stage, which have long been recognized with respect to film. 8 The stress on newness in terms such as "digital opera" and "postopera" tends to obscure the ways in which effects criticized in relation to the "old" opera and media are reproduced by these new opera performances. Frances Dyson has evoked the cinematic practice of lip synch to point out how the specific qualities associated with sound that have been claimed for new media were already exploited by the old. She observes that lip synch produces "an illusion of embodiment that owes its persuasiveness to the near impossibility of imagining voice and body as separate when the viewer feels his or her own voice to be embodied." 9 Dyson's formulation draws attention to the perception of bodily wholeness (rather than the "ventriloquial" relationship between voice and body), and the way it informs the relationship between sound and image in cinema. Her emphasis on the continuity of sound practices from the old to the new media helps question claims to the newness of some of the effects associated with digital technology, including the "new operatic phenomenologies." 10 And her recourse to the example of cinematic lip synch ultimately also reveals that the issue is audio-vision, rather than sound (or the voice) alone.

In the title of this article, "multimedia" is used as a neutral term to indicate the use of media on stage. In theater and performance studies, however, a distinction has been made between the more conventional "multimedia" and the...

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