Abstract
The 2015–2016 HingeWorks opera Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, by composer Denis Nye and librettist Megan Grumbling, does not involve singing. Its mythic heroine cannot send out cosmic arpeggios like Mozart’s night queen; she is limited to speech. A string quartet plays digitally manipulated fragments as actors speak the story of Persephone, transported to the age of climate crisis. Persephone speaks snatches of language ranging from lyric poetry to an imagined Farmer’s Almanac as she moves through the Underworld, remembering her flowering Earthly home, her mother Demeter “in the home” and heavily medicated. Adapting Greek narrative to an era of climate disruption, the opera works as an improvisational human artifact, preserved like a fossil remnant of a grand old art form.
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- 1.
See, for example, Katherine Mieszkowski, “Scarier Than Senior Year,” review of Meg Cabot’s young adult novel Abandon in The New York Times, May 12, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/books/review/young-adult-books-abandon-by-meg-cabot.html. Web, accessed March 31, 2018.
- 2.
See Aimée Carter, “Love in Mythology (Why Hades Isn’t So Bad After All),” Harlequin Blog, https://harlequinblog.com/2011/04/love-in-mythology-and-why-hades-isn’t-so-bad-after-all/. Web, accessed March 31, 2018.
- 3.
Rachel Aviv, “The Edge of Identity,” in The New Yorker, April 2, 2018, 59.
- 4.
See Joan Larkin, My Body: New and Selected Poems (New York: Hanging Loose Press, 2007).
- 5.
See Rita Dove, Mother Love (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995).
- 6.
See Louise Glück, Averno (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
- 7.
See Heidi Hart, “Edge of the Underworld,” blog post, Catching Sparks, October 7, 2010, https://heidihartwriter.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/underworld/. Web, accessed March 31, 2018.
- 8.
See Jelena Novak, Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).
- 9.
Ibid., 6.
- 10.
See HingeWorks, Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, https://vimeo.com/129142631. Web, accessed July 22, 2017.
- 11.
See HingeWorks, Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1255615825/persephone-in-the-late-anthropocene. Web, accessed July 22, 2017.
- 12.
See Lawrence Kramer, “The Voice of/in Opera,” in On Voice, Word and Music Studies 13, ed. Walter Bernhart and Lawrence Kramer (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014), 43–55.
- 13.
Ibid., 54.
- 14.
See Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
- 15.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), Translator’s Remarks, ix.
- 16.
Ibid., xiii. Derrida and his German interpreter Werner Hamacher have devoted pages of prose to writing (as l’ecriture) and its erasure, and to the ontological vacancy between and inside words. Hamacher notes, reflecting on Derrida’s commentary on Heidegger, “When Derrida speaks of the à la fois (simultaneity) of a monument and of a mirage de la trace and of the simultaneity of the trace and its effacement, at once alive and dead, and when he characterizes them as texte sans voix (texts without voice), he speaks of nothing other than that primal forgottenness of Being in which it – existent and forever shifted away from itself – abides and remains.” Werner Hamacher, “Le Sans d’Etre,” trans. Heidi Hart, forthcoming in The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, 2018, 15.
- 17.
Ibid., 46, 8.
- 18.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Emerson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Everyman’s Library, 2004), 254.
- 19.
HingeWorks, Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, https://vimeo.com/129142631. Web, accessed July 22, 2017.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Blanchot, 51.
- 22.
Sybille Krämer, Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy, trans. Anthony Enns (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 33, 60.
- 23.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Posthuman Environs,” in Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino, eds., Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene (London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 25.
- 24.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 39.
- 25.
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 27.
- 26.
Ashley Chang, “Lars Jan’s Holoscenes: Hydraulic Spectacle in the Anthropocene,” presentation at the 2018 Association of Theatre in Higher Education conference, Boston, August 4, 2018.
- 27.
Robert Davies, conversation, Utah State Anthropocene Working Group, November 11, 2016, and Rebecca McFaul, lecture-performance, Planetary Thinking curriculum development workshop, Utah State University, May 9, 2017.
- 28.
Blanchot, ix.
- 29.
See “Disintegrating Sculptures Put a Twist on WWI Memorials,” Kings College London blog, April 11, 2015, https://www.kcl.ac.uk/dentistry/newsevents/news/newsrecords/2015/oct/Disintegrating-Flesh-Sculptures-Put-a-Twist-on-WWI-Memorials-.aspx. Web, accessed March 31, 2018.
- 30.
Caitlin Desilvey, Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 5.
References
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Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
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HingeWorks, Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, n.d. https://vimeo.com/129142631.
Kings College London Blog, “Disintegrating Sculptures Put a Twist on WWI Memorials,” April 11, 2015. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/dentistry/newsevents/news/newsrecords/2015/oct/Disintegrating-Flesh-Sculptures-Put-a-Twist-on-WWI-Memorials-.aspx.
Kramer, Lawrence. “The Voice of/in Opera.” In On Voice. Word and Music Studies, eds. Walter Bernhart and Lawrence Kramer, 43–55. vol. 13. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014.
Krämer, Sybille. Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy. Trans. Anthony Enns. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015.
Larkin, Joan. My Body: New and Selected Poems. New York: Hanging Loose Press, 2007.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
Mieszkowski, Katherine. “Scarier Than Senior Year.” Review of Meg Cabot’s Young Adult Novel Abandon in The New York Times, May 12, 2011. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/books/review/young-adult-books-abandon-by-meg-cabot.html.
Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Novak, Jelena. Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.
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Hart, H. (2018). Fossil Opera: Persephone in the Late Anthropocene. In: Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01815-3_4
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