The Hypermobility Turn: Opera of The Future, The Future of Opera

Abstract

As a global artform, opera has always been on the move. Yet contemporary opera today has expanded our understanding of global flows in unprecedented ways. The COVID-19 pandemic serves as a powerful testament to how immobility can galvanize unexpected mobilities, as the creative innovations of 2020-2021 continue to generate seismic changes in our operatic ecology today. This unpredictable shift reveals a crucial insight about twenty-first century global flows: mobility is neither preordained nor stable but exists in dynamic tension with immobility, producing evolving and often unforeseen artistic possibilities. This dissertation examines the alternative mobilities shaping contemporary operatic sensibility. I investigate what it means for opera to be performed in a particular city, locale, or even cyberspace. Furthermore, in light of the pervasive racial reckoning unfolding in the performing arts, I interrogate how opera is moving beyond Western epistemes and what this shift signifies for the future of the art form. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, I analyze cross-cultural operas that illustrate how the pandemic and decolonial thought have ushered in a watershed moment for the genre. What we could call a hypermobility turn has emerged—operas predicated on breaking barriers and hierarchies, but far beyond more conventional strategies of unsettling, beyond swapping out musical or vocal styles, adapting contemporary news as plot material, foregrounding social issues, or choosing an unexpected performance venue. The change is more deep seated. Hypermobility, as I define it, resists the frameworks of conventional mobility studies by decentering geographical specificity. Rather than tracing movement from one fixed location to another, hypermobility captures the spontaneous diffusion of innovations in opera today, demanding new modes of engagement. Through transgressive movements, media, and mechanisms, contemporary opera opens up a spectrum of artistic and political possibilities. Chapter 1 examines Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber, which exemplifies Sheng’s musico-diasporic aesthetic through its interweaving of Chinese music, poetry, and stylistic allusions to Béla Bartók, a synthesis that propelled its transnational success across the US, China, and Hong Kong. Chapter 2 focuses on The Industry’s Sweet Land, a site-specific, collaboratively produced opera staged at Los Angeles at the State Historic Park. I argue that the alternative site generates ephemeral and unexpected experiential orders emerging in the here-and-now, which forge a new political sensibility in opera. Chapter 3 analyzes Yuval Sharon’s Twilight: Gods, two site-specific reimaginations of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung staged in urban multi-storied garages in Detroit and Chicago. I argue that this production serves as a critical site for investigating how alternative stagings reveal underlying ideologies of canonic operas while raising complex questions about localization and reinterpretation. Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on White Snake Projects’ The Pandemic Trilogy, a set of three live virtual operas produced during COVID-19. While proponents of cyber-stage view transmedia storytelling as a promising avenue of operatic engagement, I posit that the trilogy raised new questions about the challenges transmedia aesthetics have introduced into opera performance, asking us to put pressure on the idea that live virtual opera heralds a paradigm shift for the future of opera.