Opera for Everyone: The Industry's Experiments with American Opera in the Digital Age - Hardcover

Megan Steigerwald Ille (author)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0472076647 ISBN 13: 9780472076642

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2024

Synopsis

How one opera company represents the economic precarity and aesthetic possibilities of operatic performance in the twenty-first century U.S. Opera for Everyone: The Industry’s Experiments with American Opera in the Digital Age draws on seven years of multi-sited ethnography to examine the acclaimed experimental productions of Los Angeles-based opera company The Industry. Steigerwald Ille understands The Industry’s productions as part of an emerging wave of U.S. operas that integrate new media and interactive performance through means such as site-specificity and simulcast video, and then traces the company’s path from Crescent City (2012), the company’s first production, to Sweet Land (2020), the company’s final production before switching to a new production model. Steigerwald Ille argues that by moving opera outside of the opera house, The Industry’s productions expose the economic and aesthetic structures key to the circulation of operatic performance at the same time that they deploy opera as a tool for digital listening, community engagement, popular entertainment, and commentary on systemic racism and settler colonialism. Through ethnographic work with The Industry’s creators and performers, and close examination of the company’s first decade of work, this book reveals how The Industry paradoxically provides both a roadmap and boundary line for experimental and traditional companies trying to find new ways to approach operatic performance in the twenty-first century United States.

About this title

About the Author

Megan Steigerwald Ille is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472076647
• ISBN 13: 9780472076642
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 296