1st Edition
Participatory Opera Power and Agency in Post-Wagnerian Performance
Introduction: Opera and Participation
PART I: The Rhetoric of Participation
1 Participation and Power
2 "Towards Theater": The Art-Life Merger,
3 Discoursing Site-Specific and Participatory Values
PART II: Participatory Opera in the Twenty-First Century
4. Between Rhetoric and Reality: Participation in Invisible Cities and Hopscotch
5. I Want You to Know Me: Process, Genre, and Activism
6. Another City: New Genre Public Opera
Conclusion: A Contested Site
Biography
Kathryn L. Caton teaches music history and literature at the University of Houston, Moores School of Music. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first century opera, the long avant-garde, and experimental, collaborative, and participatory performance. She also serves as the co-chair of the Society for American Music’s Experimental Music Interest Group.
"Caton offers a meticulous history of late twentieth century ‘participatory’ artistic traditions, highlighting experimental figures often overlooked in broader narratives. Her incisive critique of the cultural capital and political valence of ‘participation’ in twenty-first century opera prompts a crucial re-examination of this frequently invoked yet heavily freighted term within experimental music and performance studies."
Charissa Noble, University of San Diego
"Participatory Opera offers an insightful and wide-ranging investigation of twentieth-century efforts to engage audiences directly in experimental performance events. Caton then focuses on multiple highly pertinent contemporary operas, prompting readers to rethink the role and place of opera’s audiences today."
W. Anthony Sheppard, author of Revealing Masks and Extreme Exoticism
