Music Seminar Series: Davinia Caddy

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When:

Tue 5 Oct ’10, 1:00pm–2:00pm

Where: University of Auckland Music Theatre, 6 Symonds Street, Auckland CBD Show map

Restrictions: All Ages

Ticket Information:

Admission: Free

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Dr Davinia Caddy presents her current research, "Opera's Gestural Turn: Through the Lens of ‘Le Coq d'or’ (The Golden Cockerel, 1914)."

This event is part of the Music Seminar Series: a series of presentations highlighting current research at the School of Music.

Abstract:
My starting point is the 1914 production by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel (Le Coq d’or to the French), a production that holds a special position in the work’s history for the peculiarities of its staging: the singers sat throughout the performance, dressed in identical caftans and relegated to the sides of the stage; dancers in costume provided the action. The resulting ‘opera-ballet’ provoked a good deal of attention. Critics contemplated the seemingly sacrilegious business of dancing to non-dance music, as well as the issue of genre: what it meant to turn an opera into a ballet, to sideline (literally) a singing component and foreground a newly designed dancing one.

This genre-based discussion is my main concern. Le Coq d’or, its realization and reception, offers a useful window onto a contemporary debate about theatrical aesthetics and staging practices, singing, dancing and standards of each, and the status and significance of opera and ballet in a newly modernized French culture. More than this, the production may be understood in the context of a widespread and specifically modernist phenomenon, one that mobilized the concept of gesture as a mode of language and expression: the ‘gesticulation of opera’.

Biography:
Davinia Caddy is Senior Lecturer in Music at The University of Auckland. She recently moved to New Zealand from the U.K., where she received her doctorate from Cambridge University in 2005. Davinia’s research focuses on French music, culture and criticism in the early twentieth century. She is currently writing two books: one on music and dance during this period; the other, a not-quite-academic guide called ‘How to hear classical music’.