Postcolonial Opera for the Age of Displacement: William Kentridge, Triumphs and Laments (2016)

25 October 2022, 4.30 PM - 25 October 2022, 6.00 PM

Mia Pistorius, Johannesburg/UCL

Victoria's Room (G.16), Department of Music, Victoria Rooms

Opera in the postcolony is a displaced form, unhomed from its original Western civilising mission. As part of the colonial project, the art form participates in a Western geopolitics of cultural place-making. But opera’s embodied and envoiced nature also enables it to problematise the politics of place by allowing its practitioners to claim material and sonic presence. The art form hence offers provocative possibilities for the exploration of postcolonial modes of dwelling and belonging.

 William Kentridge’s first processional opera, Triumphs and Laments (2016), offers an opportunity to examine opera’s participation in colonial and postcolonial practices of place-making. Performed on the banks of the river Tiber in Rome, Triumphs and Laments consists of two groups of burdened performers marching towards each other, against a backdrop of friezes applied to the riverbank. The score, by composers Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi, is based on the seventeenth-century motet ‘Al Naharot Bavel’ by Mantuan composer Salamone Rossi. Its binaural construction, distributed between the two ensembles marching toward each other, enacts a call-and-response of triumphal and elegiac sonic figures. As a metaphor for the displacement of formerly colonised peoples, the work’s processional motion—described by Homi Bhabha (2016) as ‘the biopolitics of foot power’—serves as an indictment of Western regimes of colonial expansion. But Triumphs and Laments also imagines curative forms of inhabiting for the itinerant postcolonial subject. Its performance of walking ‘in place’ may be understood to participate in the production of what Tim Edensor (2016) calls ‘mobile homeliness’.

 In this talk I take Triumphs and Laments as a starting point from which to investigate the role of opera—itself implicated in the territorial politics of coloniality—in the representation of displaced people. Drawing on theorisations of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006) I examine opera’s participation in regimes of displacement, and its potential for recuperative forms of self-presencing. Ultimately, I argue, a newly-conceived postcolonial operatic form may reconfigure Western notions of dwelling for the perpetually itinerant postcolonial subject.

Bio

Juliana M. Pistorius is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London, and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her research centres around the political role of Western art music in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, and incorporates interest in theories of voice, race, and coloniality. She is a founding member of the Black Opera Research Network and reviews editor for Cambridge Opera Journal. Her talk today draws on a recently-completed Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship, titled Postcolonial Opera: William Kentridge and the Unbounded Work of Art.

Contact information

Professor Michael Ellison: michael.ellison@bristol.ac.uk

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