Performing Remix from Broadside to Broadway
Chair(s): Jessica Peritz (Yale University)
The first record of a theatrical performance in the English colonies exists only in tattered court records. In 1665 three men were arrested in Virginia for performing a play called “The Bear and the Cub.” Charged with public wickedness, they had to appear before the judge in costume and reenact the play. The archive reveals very little about its content, yet scholars and performers have imagined that it critiqued the British, that it offended the strict morality of the Church, that maybe it involved crossdressing, or that it showed too much sympathy for indigenous people. Spoken and sung performance, even (or especially) when almost inaudible, writes histories of the unseen and unheard.
Our panel tunes into three moments in which performance (re-)constructs history, drawn from radically different, times, genres, and places. Like “The Bear and the Cub,” though with varying degrees of success, all seek to affect the perception of identity, representation, and violence. We begin in 1623 with “Good News from Virginia,” a broadside ballad that spread false narratives about violent conflict between Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan people. Songs like this sonically inscribed myths about the savagery of indigenous people and laid the groundwork for centuries of biased historiography to come. We continue with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which has long sustained violent and misogynist myths about sex and power. In recent years performers have tried to critique its most egregious passages without changing the text, but their attempts have served only to reify the power structures embodied by the work and the operatic canon generally. We end in the twenty-first century with a 2019 revival of Oklahoma!, Rodgers’s and Hammerstein’s nostalgic hymn to white settler America. Directed by Daniel Fish, the 2019 production amplified the violence of the musical and cast Rebecca Naomi Jones as the first Black Laurey on Broadway. Taken together, the innovations reject nostalgia to highlight the impossibility of an inclusive America, the same impossibility that was sung in “Good News from Virginia.”
Presentations of the Symposium
Singing Fake News
Bonnie Gordon
University of Virginia
In 1623 the Virginia Company sent the broadside “Good News from Virginia” across the Pond. Written by a “gentleman of Virginia,” the text was sung to the tune of “All those that be good fellows,” previously used in conquest texts including one with a rogue apprentice besting a Turkish sultan. “Good News” contrived a “savage massacre” to justify and export brutal retaliation against indigenous people. Virginia settlers and their supporters mobilized this polyphonic text to garner support for their venture and to reinscribe European essentialism. Heard as a sonic microhistory, “Good News from Virginia,” sounds an iteration of the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence that Enrique Dussell argued eclipsed whatever was non-European. Such a hearing adds sound to what Diana Taylor and others have described as the hemispheric performance of America: the incessant repetition of scenarios and embodied practice perpetuated by acts of imagination.
Seventeenth century Virginia ballads act as a historical pivot chord between the 16th-century Spanish Jesuit missions and 17th-century English settlers. I first show that when the English settled the Atlantic coast it was already a place where sound cued racialized difference and worked to control human behavior and territory. The English drew on precedents of sonic control set by the Spanish and Portuguese conquests in the nearby Caribbean and used familiar tropes to perform their own history. John Smith wrote that “The Warres in Europe, Asia and Africa taught me how to subdue the wilde Savages in Virginia, England and America.” I then use broadside ballads, and their afterlives, to think through the relationship between Indigeneity and Blackness and to untangle the sonic relationship between the practices and processes of enslavement and settler colonialism. Jamestown, the imagined origin of American democracy, set in motion centuries of sound and music acting as key instruments in what Farah Peterson calls a constitution of force - a blend of text and violence that erases the rights of others. From this perspective, “Good News from Virginia” stands as a ghost in the machine of the multimedia misinformation that emboldened the January 6th rioters.
Performers Critiquing Opera
Richard Will
University of Virginia
In the wake of #MeToo and the social justice movement, opera companies face new pressure to address controversial content in the repertory. They are responding, in part, by “unsettling” (David Levin) familiar works through performance, without substantively altering their original texts. Though it has a long history, I argue that revisionism of this kind does more to reify the canon than to critique it.
In a notorious, ostensibly comic scene from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, the protagonist tricks his abandoned spouse, Donna Elvira, into embracing a man whom the audience knows is the servant, Leporello, in disguise. Commentators have been cringing since the 19th century, and today the action appears plainly misogynist and classist. Performers have evidenced discomfort since at least the 1960s, when audio and video recordings show the interpreters of Leporello abandoning snickers and leers in favor of sighs, pained expressions, and other signs of a guilty conscience. By 1990 performers are revising the passage’s signature ensemble, the trio, “Ah taci ingiusto core,” whose tuneful melodies and lush textures had long inspired slow, luminous performances designed to transcend the intrigue. In recordings of the last three decades, quicker tempos, grittier sonorities, and more emphatic rhythms diminish the luminosity and prevent the music from obscuring the inhumanity on stage.
Or do they? By undercutting the comedy and the escape into Mozartian transcendence, performers register the cost of Don Giovanni’s scheme to its human victim. And yet, a depraved libertine still violates the other characters; a guilt-ridden Leporello still executes the deception; a victimized woman still looks the fool. Staging and musical interpretation can only bend a text so far, and it is not surprising that audiences still laugh along, as recent live recordings attest. Revisionist performance by itself only reaffirms the sanctity of the canon and the continued lavishing of resources on even the most problematic works. Absent more substantive remixing or adaptation, whether of individual operas or the canon as a whole, opera risks squandering its opportunity to reckon with the past.
“Now More Than Ever”: Black Womanhood and the Politics of Revival in Oklahoma! (2019)
Hannah Young
Rice University
Dubbed “sexy Oklahoma!” by effusive critics, the 2019 Broadway revival of Rodgers’s and Hammerstein’s classic musical swapped lush orchestration for a honky-tonk band, replaced period costumes with Levis, and moved the performers from a distant stage to the center of a town hall styled venue. The modern rural aesthetic made director Daniel Fish’s changes to the action all the more shocking for audiences. The most notable was the choice to have Curly shoot Jud point blank in the climax. In the original libretto, Jud attacks Curly with a knife, they grapple, and Jud falls on his own blade. In the Fish production, Curly shoots Jud on the pretense that he made a threatening gesture. The so-called sexiness of this Oklahoma!, for those who praised it, was its unflinching deadlock with violence.
Less discussed—but no less important—was that the 2019 revival featured the first Black singer in the role of Laurey on Broadway: Rebecca Naomi Jones, cast opposite two white male leads. Unlike previous “colorblind” productions of Oklahoma!, which glossed over the implications of showing a diverse cast in a historically segregated setting, this revival used non-traditional casting in order to highlight the danger Laurey faces as a single young woman. I consider Jones’s performance in relation to Fred Moten’s “break,” a generative rupture that exposes the inherent contradictions of white supremacist logics. Playing with genre expectations associated with the women stars of honky-tonk, Jones locates desire as the site where negotiation of subjectivity occurs in Oklahoma! As a result, her Laurey exhibits an awareness of her positioning as a desiring and desirable Black woman—an awareness that disrupts the narrative, because a Black Laurey cannot inhabit the white settler state that Rodgers and Hammerstein imagined.
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