CHAPTER SIX Opening Night and Amateur Night at the Same Time

THE STORY THAT HALDEMANN JULIUS TOLD / Michel Englebert "There are one thousand ways to tell a story" for George Oppen The story that Haldemann Julius told of the Italian immigrant who found work as a sewing machine operator rising early and working long hours who missed terribly not going to the opera as he had during less lean years at Bologna but in a year managed to save enough, scrimping on food, to afford a good seat to Aida and on opening night arrived early and though hungry could feel his pain slip into the green stub of his ticket, vanish when the attendant greeted him with courtesy ends as a story of joy. While the story that Haldemann Julius told of the Italian immigrant who in a year managed to save enough from his sweat-shop wages to afford a seat to Aida and on opening night walked three miles, arrived early, his suit camphorous, and gazed at photographs on posters of the former prima donnas, and found his seat and sat in it but by the middle of the first act fell asleep, being tired, ends as a story of despair. While the story that Haldemann Julius told of the Italian immigrant who for a year each week slipped three coins in an envelope counting and recounting nightly; who did not stop when he had saved enough for a mezzanine seat 68 · The Missouri Review but kept on saving till he could afford a box seat and on opening night exhumed the one brown suit folded in dignity and blue cardboard and mingled in the foyer with lovers of grand opera and ran his hand along the plush velour of the seatbacks the overture filling him and the story which he knew backwards unfolding irrevocably toward finale; who woke hours later from wonderful dreams, to applause, roused himself, joined, half dazed and cheerful, the ovation, ends as a story of joy. So that at last the story Verdi told of the Egyptian hero Rhadames spurning the princess assigned him for the slave he fancies; his murder, her murder, and the actors and the anecdotes the actors will remember from rehearsals, and the carving out of the present on the stage of Verdi's history of Egypt craftfully displayed before a crowd among which there is at least one man sleeping, overtired, becomes again a story of despair. Michel Englebert THE MISSOURI REVIEW · 69 JACK RUBY BELIEVED / Michel Englebert "Now everyone will see that Jews have balls." Jack Ruby Oh, sure, I knew Jack Ruby pretty good; in fact it used to drive him crazy because I was a pimp and him the respectable business man, but I drove respectable cars and Jack Ruby never could close a deal. Company Man I called him. The Company takes care of its own. America the Beautiful Company. Where a man from the projects can own his own club. Where you play by the rules the rules take care of you. Where you play by the rules and you be somebody. He was a good ole boy that Jack Ruby all right. And always something for sale. Mail-order make-it-big exercise twist-plate for a buck and a half, or the cheap purple bird with the big ass tilting into and out of a glass of warm water he called perpetual motion. Jack had more faith than Mary Baker Eddy; Jack believed he had class and could make it rub off. One of his girls mentioned she'd left her husband because he beat her, so when the guy showed up to patch things with his wife and take her home Jack beat him up and threw him down the stairs though all the while she was shouting at him to stop and to mind his own business. Jack believed he had power: that pathetic little gun like a blue fist; like the hand at the end of a gimpy arm. Jack believed he had friends on the Force: the same cops who'd wrestle him dirty in the basement of the Dallas County Jail 70 · The Missouri Review and would as soon have split his brain as spit if...

Cinema’s Cosmic Shifts

The life of an actor is an unpredictable one. For all the exhilarating highs – securing an agent, landing a role, a friendly house on opening night – there are countless lows, with fierce competition, limited opportunities, and frequent rejection a constant reality. New scholarship has emerged suggesting the cumulative effect of these lows is taking its toll on actors to a degree that can no longer be ignored, and that more must be done to prepare and support them throughout their careers. This article explores existing tensions surrounding the training and practice of actors, before considering the example of the Starlight Children’s Foundation, an Australian not-for-profit organisation that employs and trains actors to perform in an unorthodox environment, with compelling results. In doing so, this article invites a re-examination of prevailing tensions and prejudices concerning the work of actors and argues for a consideration of the contribution that extratheatrical employment might make to future training models, in order to aid actors in achieving greater balance in their working lives.

The Play-in-the-Novel: "The Nuns" in "Opening Nights"

Has it been duly noted that one of Doran H. Ross's last requests on this globe of sin was for a rum and coke from his home hospice nurse? And that the nurse was a Yoruba from Nigeria who, while happily complying with Mr. Ross's request, would regularly call her mom in London, excitedly telling her all about the Yoruba pop art hanging in Doran's man cave?Unpack that scene of defiance and compliance and you've got the secret of the plot. Doran had charmed the nurse, as he had so many others, with his easy banter and obvious joie de vivre, even at the moment he was exiting his extraordinary life. But then, the Doran I knew was often a key player in making difficult and wonderful things happen: getting funding for exhibitions that many thought too edgy to mount; transforming, with Director Christopher B. Donnan, a basement collection of “Ethnic Arts” (horrible name!) into a world-class Museum of Cultural History, a process which had begun in 1971 under the museum's first director, George Ellis; expanding the range of African Arts contributors from a clubby base of old-boy insiders into an increasingly sophisticated cadre of international artists and scholars; and collaborating with canon-shattering art historian Arnold Rubin in the launching of ACASA, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association.I played a cameo role in several of these scenarios. While I was executive secretary of the African Studies Association (ASA), Doran and Arnold pitched their proposal for ACASA, a request which I was reluctant to approve, fearing it might draw ASA members away from the mother ship. However, these gents convinced me otherwise and proceeded to nurture what quickly became the premier international organization of African art historians.And a few years later, Doran coaxed me into serving as coeditor of African Arts, playing the sidekick in our vigorous efforts to make the journal more relevant to its diverse readership. I retired from African Arts in 2004, while Doran stayed on as a coeditor till 2015. As a clear measure of his commitment to the journal, he went on to publish fifty-two pieces in it, including feature articles; artist portfolios; book, film, and exhibition reviews; First Words; In Memoria; and photo essays.It was at the beginning of our coeditorship that the journal's executive editor, Amy Futa, suggested that Doran's middle initial “H” (provenance unknown) might stand for “Hrothgar” in honor of his Viking ancestry and of the stature and girth he shared with that giant hero of the Beowulf saga. So Hrothgar he became, since like that epic progenitor, everything about Doran was Size XXX.Of all our collaborations, the Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou project is closest to my heart. Like so many other projects whose true dimensions are not at first perceived, this one began over recurring courses of an Italian feast and way too many cocktails (regarding food and drink Doran was both gourmet and gourmand). Picture Doran, Marilyn Houlberg, and me seated in a restaurant on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin. It's a cold and rainy Halloween night. Revelers from the 1986 ASA annual meetings are masquerading outside the window as Doran proposes that Marilyn and I co-curate a “Vodou show” for the Fowler Museum. Had any of us foreseen what that immodest proposal would turn out to entail, we might well have ordered several more bottles of wine.Don't get me wrong: the project idea itself was a natural. Marilyn and I were fellow travelers in the Black Atlantic avant la lettre. We both had been hanging around with the same crowd of street touts and oungans (Vodou priests) in Haiti just as a generation earlier we had been revelers in the fabulous Nigerian pop culture of the ‘60s (think Amos Tutuola, Twins 77, and Fela Kuti Ransom). Insofar as the project would have “a look” it would be born out of the common aesthetic we perceived at work on both sides of the Atlantic.Doran knew where we were coming from. He too had begun his own monumental field-work on the pop culture and traditional arts of Ghana and their extensions in the New World. But he also appreciated the disjunction between the lurid Euro-American (read “White”) stereotypes of a phony religion called “voodoo” and the staggering beauty of the sacred arts generated by the all-too-real religion called Vodou. But I suspect he knew something else: how difficult it would be to find funding and venues for a show judged to be about “voodoo” and relished the challenge. And perhaps, as we drained our last glasses, he foresaw one last thing: just how damn much fun the whole enterprise might turn out to be.Our first implementation grant proposal was submitted to NEH in December 1988. Although it was uniformly favored by a peer review panel, it was turned down by some apparatchik in Director Lynne Cheney's office who found the proposal “too celebratory.” A “toned down” revision of the proposal was resubmitted in spring 1989 and again received an enthusiastic approval from another peer review panel. This time, one of La Cheney's minions vetoed the peer reviewers, complaining that our proposal didn't subject Vodou to evaluation on a “comparative humanistic scale of religions.” We were left wondering to what religious phenomena the minion thought Vodou should be compared: The Inquisition? The Salem Witch Hunt? Oral Robert's apparition of a 900 ft. Jesus?If the curators were discouraged, Doran remained charged up and resourceful. Calling in some friendly chips, he got the project a life-sustaining bridge grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. And then Bill Clinton got elected in 1992; Lynne Cheney was out of a job; and a restaffed NEH fully funded our third submission in winter 1993. Skål Hrothgar!Doran's dogged persistence in obtaining funding was only Act One in his role as project director. From those proffered drinks in Madison, he spent the next decade worrying over details of the show and book with the co-curators and the Fowler's fabulous staff. But alas, as we were busy putting an exhibition together in Los Angeles, Haiti was busy falling apart. After a junta of military goons overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country's first popularly elected president, the United States placed a trade embargo on the island, and Haitian civil society began unravelling.So it was with real trepidation that I brought Doran to Haiti for his first field trip in 1994. I needn't have worried. More than merely understanding, he seemed to chunk the aesthetic he encountered as we visited the ounfos (temples) where Marilyn and I had worked. Not a man to move by half measures, Doran negotiated the loan of entire altars, always sensitive to include manbos (priestesses) and oungans in their documentation (Fig. 1). And when not in the temples, he was sneaking off to galleries and ateliers, searching for the most brilliant paintings and sculptures to contextualize the temple arts, his connoisseurship adding a Hi/Lo dimension to the exhibition and its award-winning publication.As they say, tout le reste est l'histoire. The show travelled to seven prestigious museum venues (the exact number predicted by Edner Pierre, whose altar for Gede was borrowed for the exhibition), garnering increasingly glowing reviews. Its grand finale at the American Museum of Natural History was lavishly reviewed by New York Times art critic Holland Cotter and, at its closure in January 1999, the Times named it one of the “10 Best Exhibits of 1998.” At no point in any of its celebrated tour did Doran step forward to share in any of its acclaim. Unlike the first Hrothgar, he was not in the game for fame. He never showed up on other venues’ opening nights, never stood together with the co-curators in front of a camera. His satisfaction was in a project well conceived and well staged (Figs. 2–3), and a denigrated tradition of sacred art recognized for its magnificence.How to sum up a man of such excellent contradictions? Cosmopolitan and provincial. Reared in Fresno but at-home in his beloved West LA man-cave and in the Kumasi atelier of Akan artist “Almighty God,” who was the subject of his final research (Fig. 4). The best of friends and an incorrigible tease (after I broke my nose, he presented me with a self-drafted volume of celebrated quotes about great schnozes from Cyrano de Bergerac to J.J. Gittes). The most refined of connoisseurs, who organized bus tours of LA neon signs for his friends, enhancing their glow with bottles of brandy and boxes of chocolates. And who organized a pilgrimage to the grave of Blinky, the Friendly Hen (Fig. 5), whose macabre and hilarious funeral installation at LACMA was conceived and curated by Jeffrey Valence. For that particular lark he engaged a stretch limo and invited veterans of the Vodou Project: Dave Mayo, its designer; Fran Krystock, its collection manager; Henrietta Cosentino, editor of its prize-winning publication; Betsy Quick, the Fowler director of education and Doran's longtime partner, together of course with Hrothgar and me. We reconstituted ourselves into a sextet self-designated as “The Usual Suspects,” and remained the closest of friends for the rest of Doran's life.

Acting, Embodiment, and Text:Hedda Gabler and Possible Uses of Cognitive Science Rhonda Blair (bio) In spring 2009, I led a workshop staging of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler for the Division of Theatre at Southern Methodist University in order to provide some of our MFA students with an opportunity to work on a major piece of modern realism. Our purpose was to focus on embodiment and relationship in acting, which drew on research I have been doing in cognitive neuroscience. Although I first focused on the individual actor, particularly in regard to text and action, I am now exploring applications of science to partnered work. Informed by research on embodiment, cognition, and the relationship among individuals, I wanted to investigate ways to help actors understand not that they need to "be in their body," but that they are, in fact, nothing if they are not a body. The phrase "be in your body" is useful though potentially problematic, in much the same way that the ubiquitous Meisnerian "get out of your head" is. While we more or less know what these phrases mean, the images they conjure up perpetuate false binaries that split mind from body and risk hobbling the actor by giving her a false, fragmented image of herself. The cognitive and neurosciences can define more accurately how the various aspects of the actor's self affect and even arise out of one another, and help her to more effectively manipulate those different aspects in engaging her fellow performers and creating a role. What we did physically with Hedda might not have looked terribly different from some standard approaches to acting, but the actors' understanding of what we were doing, their point of view, their imagery work, and our intense focus on relationship varied in some significant regards. Second-year MFA actors played the roles of Hedda, Tesman, Thea, and Lovborg; an undergraduate senior played Berte; and two faculty colleagues—professional actors Leslie Brott and Jack Greenman—played Aunt Julie and Judge Brack. Our "lab" environment freed us from pressures of an "opening night" or a paying audience, though I still wished we had had more time. Our initial plan was to work throughout the semester, but, because of schedule conflicts with other productions, we were limited to twenty-four hours a week for half that time, roughly six weeks. Our arena configuration in a small studio space seated roughly thirty-five people; we used only rehearsal furniture and props; clothes were pulled from actors' closets; and we had some lighting that was designed and executed as we were rehearsing. We were concerned with historical period or accuracy only insofar as it strengthened our emotional and imaginative engagement with the play's story. Because I had directed Hedda twice before in fully produced, academic theatre season offerings, I knew the play well and was able to jump quickly into substantial work on key elements in the text. I understood the pitfalls of the script, such as the dangers of melodrama and "neck-up" acting, dangers of presumption about how Ibsen "should be done," the speed of the plot and action—huge revelations, turns-on-a-dime, extremity of the feelings, which might lead one to overlook the humor and emotional amplitude of the play. We limited table work—the traditional "first phase" of the process in which director and actors read carefully through the play and discuss meaning, context, and possible interpretations prior to getting the work on its feet. While table work and preliminary discussion are necessary, too much can constrain the more experiential aspects of an actor's discovery. The wrong kind of table [End Page 11] work can inhibit by defining a too-narrow range of possible outcomes, closing down exploration too quickly. Actors can abuse table work to make premature choices about character and action before they get on their feet. (I am put in mind of Meryl Streep's response to Mike Nichols's question about her acting process: "Oh, you never know what you're going to do until you do it" [Streep, qtd. in McGrath 2009].) This is related to the challenge of getting actors to use themselves, particularly their imaginations, as...

Chapter 14 - Care and Maintenance of Wigs

presence in the Bay Area among artists of all media writers, performers, playwrights, painters. That is why it scheduled to show in its galleries during the summer of 1992 Pasidn por Frida, an exhibit on the legacy of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Nevertheless, the museum's curators were completely taken by surprise when 1,500 peo'ple arrived at the exhibit's opening night. They had been even more surprised when, weeks earlier, two hundred people came to audition for a part in the opening night's drama during which five of Kahlo's self-portraits were to be recreated in tableau vivant. What came as no surprise, however, to anyone at the museum was this: not all the contestants were artists; not all were Mexican, Mexican-American, or even Latino. Nor were they all women.2 What is it about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, a woman born in 1907 and who died almost forty years ago (1954), that would draw such a response? What is it about Kahlo that has people from all over the world and of different nationalities, cultures, genders, and ages buying her biographies, traveling to see her portraits, recreating her

Homay King is assistant professor of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she teaches film studies. She received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley's rhetoric department in 2002. Her essay “The Sadness of the Gaze: Kubrick's Barry Lyndon” will appear in Kubrick in Perspective, a forthcoming collection from Cambridge University Press.

Reviewed by: Tosca by Giacomo Puccini Hannah Lewis TOSCA. Music composed by Giacomo Puccini. Libretto by Luigi Illica. Directed by David Lefkowich. Austin Opera, Circuit of the Americas, Austin, Texas. April 29, 2021. Click for larger view View full resolution Latonia Moore as Tosca and Adam Smith as Cavaradossi in Austin Opera’s Tosca. (Photo: Erich Schlegel.) Political intrigue, a jealous opera diva, murder, double-crossing, and suicide: Puccini’s classic opera Tosca is larger than life. With its dramatic narrative set to Puccini’s beautifully lyric late-Romantic melodies and lush orchestral scoring, it is no wonder that Tosca continues to be a staple of the opera canon. It was only fitting that Austin Opera chose this perennial favorite for their ambitious return to live performance, after halting all productions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The outdoor venue— the Circuit of the Americas, home to America’s Formula 1 racetrack—seemed suitably grandiose for the occasion (while also allowing for social distancing). Austin Opera had initially planned for a traditional staging of the opera, but director David Lefkowich decided that the unusual setting necessitated a more modern restaging. His production recast the story from Rome in 1800 in the shadow of Napoleon’s invasion of Italy, to Italy in 1943, in Mussolini’s fascist grip. The Germania Insurance Amphitheater, situated next to the massive racetrack with an imposing observation tower just behind it, normally hosts rock concerts, but was sitting unused during the pandemic. Employing over 125 local artists and stage crew who were temporarily out of work, Austin Opera’s Tosca was perhaps the highest-profile public performance in Austin since the pandemic. The grandiosity of the chosen opera and unusual venue epitomized perseverance in the face of adversity. But the number of challenges that Austin Opera faced in mounting the production were more considerable than they could have anticipated. As Lefkowich and general director Annie Burridge recounted in a brief address before the performance, the set was meant to resemble a fascist Danteum building, with giant letters “Viva Il Duce” in the background. The week before opening night, a storm destroyed the entire set. Instead, the salvaged letters “Viva” were featured on an otherwise sparse stage, serving as a visual symbol of the celebration of challenges overcome, even if incongruous with the evening’s tragic story. According to publicity for the production, the performance also planned to take advantage of the sunset, timed to correspond with act 1’s impressive finale, “Te Deum.” Instead, opening night was met with a steady drizzle that later turned into heavier rain. The start time was delayed for twenty minutes in the hopes that the [End Page 557] rain would let up enough for the orchestra to play without damaging their instruments. Click for larger view View full resolution Aleksey Bogdanov as Scarpia in Austin Opera’s Tosca. (Photo: Erich Schlegel.) Eventually, it was announced that the performance would begin with electric piano, rather than full orchestra, until it was safe for the other instruments to come onstage. With empty seats visible in the orchestra and a piano accompanying the singers, the performance felt more casual, smaller in scope, almost like a rehearsal. During intermission, the musicians assembled onstage, but the rain resumed and they quickly exited, leaving only the keyboardist for the rest of the evening. Given the circumstances, the singers performed admirably. Their talent deserved a full set and orchestra to back up their stage presence and their voices; yet, even in the production’s stripped-down state, they were consummate professionals, their vocal and acting talent shining through. Latonia Moore fully embodied the complex emotional range of the title character. Aleksey Bogdanov, as Scarpia, was a frightening villain, bringing all the bile to the character that audiences have come to expect. Adam Smith, as Tosca’s lover, the artist Cavaradossi, was particularly impressive, especially when he delivered the dramatic emotional aria, “E lucevan le stelle,” in act 3. Cavaradossi sings this romantic aria as he awaits execution by firing squad. It was raining more heavily at this point and by the time he finished singing he was soaking wet, but remained completely in character and seemingly unfazed...

In June 2017, I presented a performance lecture called Phantom Stages at the gallery Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin. The lecture formed part of a research programme and group show called Hidden Lines of Space that explored the historical developments of the architectural floor plan and their practical implications, readability, and effects. The project invited artists and researchers to consider the representation of space in the floor plan; both how it operates functionally on the one hand and as a free artistic conception and thus as an expression of future design on the other. The project explored the crossovers between theatrical production, theatre (and non-theatre) architecture and visual arts practice. I went armed with magicians’ flash paper, a remote control car, the plastic skull of Yorick, neon pink spike tape, a vase of roses and a fully loaded cap gun. I had images of Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, the original 1949 production of Death of A Salesman, John Cassavetes’ Opening Night, and multiple pictures of Laurence Olivier as Hamlet. The following artist pages attempt to restage fragments of the lecture on the page, to find a place for this material to settle by evoking further speculations about the phantom life of the theatrical floor plan.

Oscar Wilde dashed off The Importance Of Being Earnest in less than a month and George Bernard Shaw never corrected a line. But for most playwrights the process is more laborious. Plays today are not so much written as rewritten. Of course, poems are rewritten too. But a poet usually knows when his work is finished. A playwright can’t tell until he has heard the words spoken by actors. This can lead to acute emotional turmoil when opening night is just a couple of weeks away. Hence the importance of the Banff Playwrights Colony. Here a playwright can have his work read by professional actors, without worrying about opening night. If something is wrong, there is still time to fix it.

The eighth edition of the Theatre Festival of the Americas (FTA) got off to a rough start. On opening night, after the festivities and the seemingly endless number of welcomes from politicians and sponsors at the Monument National had ended, the bulk of the opening night audience made its way over to Usine C, where Paula de Vasconcelos’s Les Bacchantes was scheduled as the main opening night event. Less than fifteen minutes into the show, however, the power went out, and some time later the performance was cancelled, leaving organizers scrambling to rearrange tickets for reviewers and others. The next day – the day before its scheduled opening – word came that another of the festival’s headline events from Montreal, Brigitte Haentjens’s production of Malina, was cancelled altogether when adaptation rights were oddly and belatedly refused by the estate of Ingeborg Bachmann.

Reimagining The Ruins of Scenography Tanja Beer (bio) Opening night at the theater and the stage is awash with color and spectacle, an awe-inspiring display of set and costume extravagance. Fast-forward eighteen months: this wondrous design has transformed itself into a mountainous ruin, oozing from a skip deep in the bowels of the building. These contemporary “theater ruins’” begin relatively harmlessly, hidden behind dusty staircases and at the back of storage units, crowding corridors and littering dressing rooms. But sooner or later, what doesn’t make it into the recycle bin is cast off to the land of “away,” where skips overflow into leaching landfills, and, inevitably, into our fragile ecosystems. It is here that we encounter the unsettling reality that our arts practices have consequences. The ephemeral and highly specific nature of theatrical work means that most set and costume designs are only valued for the duration of the performance season (often a matter of days or weeks) before they are discarded.1 Designers are rarely contracted to consider the impact of their designs after opening night, or to build post-production possibilities into their creative processes. But does it need to be this way? Can the image of the skip as the final resting place of most theatrical designs instead be revised to find another endpoint where creativity and innovation can once again flourish? How might scenographers embrace cyclic rather than linear production processes to rethink the potential of art’s refuse? [End Page 487] This essay explores the role of the scenographer in seeking out the artistic potential of unconventional materials and discarded objects in and beyond the theater. Here, extending the use of materials is not approached out of austerity but fueled by a desire for invention and ingenuity—a way of rethinking design in response to ecological values. Moving beyond the transient nature of performance design, I ask whether post-production considerations can become an integral component of the design concept and thereby extend the legacy of the project. I consider how the temporality of scenic design can be reexamined so that the “end-point” of production is no longer seen as waste, but becomes an opportunity (intellectual as well as material) for continuing the creative process itself. Central to this investigation is a reconsideration of notions of value in and beyond the theater. Instead of concentrating on waste reduction through the reuse of objects, the focus of this research is to examine how recycled materials and found objects can generate value and make a contribution beyond the restricted theatrical economy of production. For example, a set designer might seek out the untapped creative possibilities of readily available resources (such as stock items, found objects, and discarded materials), or materials that might ordinarily be rubbished or otherwise devalued, as a means of creating something of beauty and resonance that might also extend beyond the performance event. This essay begins by introducing the concept of ecoscenography, a practice I define as the integration of ecological thinking into all stages of scenographic production and aesthetics.2 Rethinking conventional production processes, I examine contemporary thinking about material culture and agency through the scenographer’s practice of “making.” Using a practice-based research project—This Is Not Rubbish, which began in December 2012 and unfolded in four phases over a span of two years—I explore the journey of material rescued from the landfill and its capacity to create immersive performance spaces and wearable artifacts. This Is Not Rubbish considers how post-production procedures may be considered an integral part of the scenographic event and its broader artistic project.3 The project situates itself in the field of expanded scenography,4 where scenographic practices are considered outside of “conventional roles and sites of [End Page 488] theater”5 to engage with broader issues of social and environmental advocacy. While This Is Not Rubbish was conducted primarily outside of traditional contexts of theater making (to enable greater flexibility to explore novel ideas and approaches), this essay also considers potential applications of the project to conventional theater design practices as well. AN INTRODUCTION TO ECOSCENOGRAPHY “Ecoscenography” is a neologism I use to bring scenography into an increased awareness of...

Reactions to the premiere Ludovic Halevy realized on opening night that Carmen had failed (see his account in Chapter 2). A few days later, he assigned the blame to unfamiliarity: “It took a little time for [staff and performers] to get to like and admire this score. At the outset we were more astonished than enchanted by it. Such was the evident impression on the audience the first evening. The effect of the performance was uncertain, indecisive. Not bad, but not good either.” If Halevy found it difficult to read the audience's cool response during the performance itself, he did not have to wait long to learn the grounds for its displeasure. While unfamiliarity no doubt played a role, it was by no means the principal problem cited by the reviews that began appearing immediately. Bizet's opera sparked antagonisms along two fronts: moral propriety and musical style. Given his boasts that he intended to “change the genre of opera-comique ” and the protests of the Opera-Comique management over the project, the hostility with which Carmen was greeted in the press ought not to have been a surprise. Yet the response devastated Bizet, who is reported to have exclaimed during opening night: “Don't you see that all these bourgeois have not understood a wretched word of the work I have written for them?” The most ferocious of the attacks objected to the explicit portrayal of female sexuality in the opera, and the most abusive of these came from Jean-Pierre-Oscar Comettant and Achille de Lauzieres, Marquis de Themines.