Binding: Hardcover
Description: The first book to use subversive sexuality as a lens through which to provocatively view opera in the 21st century. Imagine Armida Handel's Saracen sorceress performing her breakneck coloraturas in a black figure - hugging rubber dress beating her insubordinate furies into submission with a cane suspending a captive Rinaldo in chains from the ceiling of her dungeon. Mozart's peasant girl Zerlina meanwhile is tying up and blindfolding her fianc to seduce him out of his jealousy of Don Giovanni. And how about Wagner's wizard Klingsor ensnaring his choir of flower maidens in elaborate Japanese rope bondage? Opera it would appear has developed a taste for sadomasochism. For decades now radical stage directors have repeatedly dressed canonical operas from Handel and Mozart to Wagner and Puccini and beyond in whips chains leather and other regalia of SM and fetishism. Deviant Opera seeks to understand this phenomenon approaching the contemporary visual code of perversion as a lens through which opera focuses and scrutinizes its own configurations of sex gender power and violence. The emerging image is that of an art form that habitually plays with an eroticization of cruelty and humiliation inviting its devotees to take sensual pleasure in the suffering of others. Ultimately Deviant Opera argues that this species of opera fantasizes about breaking the boundaries of its own role - playing and pushing its erotic power exchanges from the enacted to the actual.
Title: Deviant Opera Sex Power And Perversion On Stage
Author(s): Englund Axel
Publisher: University Of California Press
Barcode: 9780520343252
Pages: 280 Pages, 44 B-W Photographs
Publication Date: 10/6/2020
Category: Popular Culture