Abstrakt
Where the relationship between voice and body in opera has often been theorized in terms of a gap or split, this article concentrates on how a perceived unity of voice and body is constructed in multimedia opera. I understand this unity as an effect with particular aims and purposes, which may be produced in new works of opera as well as multimedia productions of the operatic canon and pieces of new music theatre.
In this article I analyze it with the help of Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway's opera Writing to Vermeer (1999). I demonstrate how a sense of an "organic" unity of voice and body is created in the opera, and I argue that its alignment with liveness and femininity challenges some of the critical claims that have been made with respect to the singing voice, especially those that associate the voice's subversive power with the escape from signification, and/or oppose it to both the visual and the textual.
These claims have often been informed by a critique of the Western representational regime, and especially the (mastering and male) gaze. Rather than looking for subversive alternatives to this regime in terms of the aural, I draw on theories that suggest such alternatives from within the realm of vision, and I rethink them in terms of audio-vision.
I associate the political potential of multimedia opera with a particular, physiological sensitivity of the perceiver's body to the body perceived, and I demonstrate how, in Writing to Vermeer, this potential is opened up by a "haptic" quality of projected images in conjunction with reproduced sounds.