It has been a real education working with the performing artists from Melbourne Opera. It is becoming quite a fertile partnership! Opera singers really have their work cut out for them and each time I work with them my respect and admiration for them as dramatic artists grows.
I am struck by the amount of creative attention they need to attend to the great task of instrument work, while also attending to the massive emotional and story requirements that Opera is so famous for – and somewhere inside all of this they are also expected to act.
We worked together on the stage at the Athenaeum Theatre last week, applying story theory, scene analysis and dramatic action.
The focus was on finding ways to use implicit consciousness, dropped in circumstances, and the inherited substrate of narrative to access deep and true levels of intentionality while leaving the lion’s share of the performer’s aesthetic consciousness free to attend to singing the notes.
Onwards!
Iain Sinclair