Fox, the nun and the dragon: an autoethnographical opera

Abstract

This thesis re-narrativises the fiction of the dominant composer, deploying a mixed methodology combining Actor Network Theory [ANT] and autoethnography. I propose the concept of the ‘Operatic Collaborator Network [OCN]’, through which I trace a Latourian network of the opera creation process. Through the OCN I expand the purview of an ANT reading of opera-making to embrace emotionality, memory and a creative ideation network. This enmeshes ANT with an autoethnographical lens, simultaneously de-centring the composer and the notion of ‘text’ as the focus of opera studies, yet bringing personal, embodied, emotive experience and intersubjectivity to the fore. I enact this through using a range of qualitative data: memory-based, self-reflexive accounts (‘mystory’ texts), observational ethnographic field notes and reflexive dyadic interviews. This data is viewed through an analytical meta-narrative drawing on a wide literature relating to the sociology of art, ANT and autoethnography, and in particular on Derrida’s notion of ‘hauntology’, and, in the latter part of the thesis, my own related concept of a dream rhetoric framework.

The OCN is traced through the creation of my three portfolio operas: ‘The Angel Esmeralda’, ‘Fox-Tot!’, and ‘Catriona and the Dragon.’ I also analyse an R&D process based on re-designing my opera ‘BambinO’ for the COVID-19 era, where the concepts of haunting and a collective dream-telling framework come together. In this way I use work from the past to explore notions of futurity within opera-making, with my portfolio operas representing a transition from opera before the pandemic, to the realities of opera creation within an OCN reconfigured by the virus-actor COVID-19. Embodied creative processes are viewed through the eyes of the artist-researcher, who assembles the textual opera as an artful narrative to stand alongside the portfolio operas.