Are you serious? Workplace agenda and aesthetic negotiations with depictions at opera rehearsals

Abstract

During scenic opera rehearsals, the participants create performance bodies – fictive behaviours that portray the characters in the libretto. They use depictions – interactional practices comprised of short scenes staged for the other participants – to propose and negotiate performance bodies that suit the developing aesthetics of the production. In this paper, we focus on non-serious proposal depictions: depictions that become treated as laughable and not suitable for the performance. Non-serious depictions can accomplish joint fictionalizations, especially with teasing (Cantarutti, 2022), and are used in contrast with an ideal performance (Keevallik, 2010). Building on this work, we analyze how non-serious depictions are used to decide what the wished performance will be. We discuss two types of non-serious depictions in the workplace setting of the opera rehearsal process and show how negotiations over the seriousness of depictions achieve aesthetic intersubjectivity among the colleagues. The ambiguity between serious and non-serious proposals is exploited as a resource when navigating the unknown territories of a piece of art under development. The material consists of 20 h of video-recorded opera rehearsals in Swedish and English, with an Italian libretto.