ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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

REVIEWS

“Compared to how abundantly pieces of contemporary musical theatre and opera are present on all kinds of scenes, the literature about this field is still meager. Opera For Everyone is extremely welcome as it illuminates the world and poetics of contemporary opera and it turns this interest into a dynamic book.”
—Jelena Novak, CESEM (Center for Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music), FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa

— Jelena Novak

“Opera for Everyone is a substantive, enlightening, and important work of scholarship that lays the groundwork for further research in the lively field of opera studies. In her examination of The Industry, Steigerwald Ille draws on a multiplicity of voices—a strategy that complements the multivalent complexity of opera—and her sincere, thoughtful engagement with the ethics of contemporary opera production offers an excellent model for the study of performing arts in the twenty-first century.”
—Ryan Ebright, Bowling Green State University

— Ryan Ebright

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Introduction
From Recession to Pandemic: Operatic Contexts
Yuval Sharon and The Industry
Methods: Precarity, Perspectives, and Critique
Plan of Book
Chapter 1: Opera as Mobile Music: Invisible Cities
Introduction
Experiencing Mediated Performance: Logistics
Interpretive Ambiguity, Audience Agency
Performance History and Digital Adaptation
Writing for Headphones: Making Sound Design Visible
New Rules of Spectatorship: Listening to Invisible Cities
Audile Techniques and Consumerism
Wagner’s Invisible Theater, Brecht’s headphones?
Convention or Experimentation?
Conclusions: Contradictory Spectatorships and the Operatic Genre
Chapter 2: Operatic Economics: Liveness and Labor in Hopscotch
Introduction
Operatic Tradition on Wheels: The Production
Fractured Logistics
Hybrid Spectatorships
The Labor of the Live
Mediated Entertainment and Operatic Distance
Look at Me! Isolation in Digital Performance
Curation and Commodification
Mediating Intimacy and Isolation
Performers, Participants, and Power
Participating in Precarity
Commodities and Conclusions
Chapter 3: Experiments with Institutionality: Galileo, War of the Worlds, and ATLAS
Introduction
Precarities and Production: Galileo and War of the Worlds
Traditional Structures and Closed Systems
Closed Institutional Precedents and Contemporary Manifestations
New Approaches to Political Economy: Open Models of Production
Open Institutional Lineages: Economic and Experimental Tensions
War of the Institutional Frameworks?
Coda: ATLAS
Chapter 4: “What you remember doesn’t matter”: Toward an Anti-Colonial Opera
Introduction
Colonizer Opera
New Models of Collaboration
Experimenting with Form: From Workshop to Film
Representing Individuals, Rejecting Tokenism, Re-envisioning Opera
Moving Beyond Colonial Collaboration: Rehearsals
Moving Beyond Colonial Collaboration: Performer Composition
“If you’re going to change opera, you have to change it”: Lingering Colonial Hierarchies
Conclusion: Colonial Hauntings, Anti-Colonial Ambiguities
Epilogue
Introduction
Closing the Curtain on Sweet Land: March-November 2020
The Future of Opera for Everyone and The Industry’s Artistic Director Collective
Everyone’s Opera

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