Chapter 1
1.2.e A Brief Survey of Contemporary Related Works
In 2002 Lustig and Shepherd-Barr wrote about the use of physics and science to inspire playwrights. They cite several examples, including Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998), which plays with the quantum concepts of uncertainty and the principle of complementarity, and Timberlake Wertenbaker's After Darwin (1998) where natural selection is played out through an increasingly tense relationship between two friends. Since this we have seen Nick Payne’s Constellations (2012), Michael Chemers' Birth of Stars (2009) and Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes (2017). The idea of using anthropomorphic scientific thoughts in a metaphorical or allegorical manner is also far from new. Blake (2015) argues that the mediaeval play Nature by Henry Medwall (1495) is doing just this with Aristotelian physics through the use of characters such as Nature, Sensuality and Reason. The more recent works in this canon do explore science in many of the ways my work seeks to, by searching for human relationships that can be paralleled within the laws of nature. However, these are all explored through spoken word, and do not make use of the multimodal nature of opera.
Beyond this there have been some recent examples of opera making use of science to create new works. Science and physics are something that frequently makes the headlines and has an increasingly important and prevalent place in our world. As such it makes sense that there has been a rise in the number of operas created about physics. Philip Glass has created three works on physicists: Einstein on the Beach with libretto by Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson (1976), Galileo Galilei with libretto by Mary Zimmerman and Arnold Weinstein (2002) and Keplar with librettist Martina Winkel (2009). In Einstein on the Beach the libretto seeks to generate a sense of the various different periods of Einstein’s life and discoveries or aspects of his character. Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson worked to embed these aspects of Einstein into every layer of the production. Lancaster (2000: online) describes this process in the direction by saying that ‘[U]nder Wilson's eyes the stage became a geometric space of scientific potentiality in embryonic process’ and describing how each scene was dramatically engineered to represent different concepts or dreams of the scientist. The libretto for Einstein on the Beach is a non-narrative series of minimalist sketches and involves the use of “knee-plays” which link the different main scenes together. This is also partly what inspired me to make use of a dual-linear form for The Flowering Desert (which I shall discuss further in chapter 2) with which one narrative is used as a series of thoughts between the scenes of the main dramatic story. This type of work is somewhat opposed to the types of stories and characters I am presenting, however. My work aims to explore an emotional journey extracted from the science, whereas Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson did not discuss the emotional content of their scenes (Broadhurst, 2012: online).
In 2005 John Adams and Peter Sellars created Dr Atomic based on the two central figures of the Manhattan Project: General Leslie Groves and scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer. This libretto makes use of found textual material from various sources including poetry by John Dunne and Murial Rukeyser, the Bhagavad Gita and various extracts from declassified documents such as the Smyth Report, and Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (Herken, 2005). The chorus that sings the technical and scientific text from these documents act almost as a Greek chorus, explaining the physics and giving a moral commentary on the events unfolding on stage. There is focus on the relationship between Oppenheimer and his wife, making use of many biographical elements of the journey towards nuclear warfare at the end of the second world war. Although this deals with a scientific subject and involves many technical terms and concepts in the text, the style of the work remains distinct from the more formal elements of my libretti in this research.
In 2015 Giovanni Battistelli premiered CO2 about global warming, inspired by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Batistelli’s opera provides us with an allegorical approach to the issue and he has said himself ‘It is a difficult love story, between man and earth.’ (Schmid, 2015: online). During the creation of this work the librettist, Ian Bruton, took care to consider how to create a work which would inspire a sense of empathy in his audience. In the choice of name, he asked a group of university students to choose between three names, for which ‘they felt greater empathy, imaginative solicitation’ (Menichetti, 2015). During the work there are many key cultural figures represented e.g., Adam and Eve, the deity Shiva, archangels, the serpent and various scientists. Alongside these, the character of the Earth itself is represented in an anthropomorphised form as Gaia, with whom the other human characters frequently interact. This work makes use of many similar elements that I explore in this research by presenting trans-cultural elements, exploring a topic that is relevant to a global audience, and making use of anthropomorphised characters to generate a greater sense of empathy for the non-human subjects.
Hypermusic Prologue: A projective opera in seven planes has a libretto written by physicist Lisa Randall and music by Héctor Parra. This opera is based on Randall’s extra-dimensional guide Warped Passages: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions which includes constant references to popular song lyrics. The opera tells the love story of a man and woman living in different dimensions. While the physics is embedded in the plot of the opera, it is not important to understanding it. Parra has said '[t]he audience isn’t obligated to understand anything Lisa does. They will feel anguish, they will feel unification and accomplishment.' (Powell, 2009: online). The aims and outcomes of this work as described by both librettist and composer are similar to some of the outcomes from this research. Randall describes herself as trying to provide a ‘forum to open up people’s imagination, let them know there is more beyond what we can see’, and that to her the most important outcome was that people do not necessarily learn from the work but that they are exposed to other ideas, dimensions and possibilities (Parra, 2010: online). For Parra an important outcome was that the work might provoke ‘a catharsis that has to do with our inner relationship to the physical world.’ (Parra, 2010: online).
Other science-based operas which explore anthropomorphising include The Locust by Jeffrey A. Lockwood, 2019 (Millius, 2018: online) on entomology and The Unsung Heroes of the Planet by librettist/director Ruth Mariner (2017: online) on fungi and the environment. Both of these works were written specifically for pedagogical goals. Their aim, in contrast to the aims of my research and the outcomes and aims of Randall’s work as described above, is to help the audience to learn from the subjects on stage, imparting specific information directly through the text and performance. Lockwood himself published a paper on the results of the performances, and their abilities in science communication. He states in the introduction that:
As much as artistic expression might be an effective means of communicating science, it is important to recognize that art is not merely a way of making science pretty or digestible (Dressler and Borrelli 2018). Art should be a full partner with science in efforts to understand the natural world. (Lockwood et al., 2020: online).
The use of anthropomorphism as a tool towards delivering the information to the audience is important in this work. However, the main scientific information in both pieces mentioned above is delivered through the character of a scientist, and is used to help the audience to solve a mystery (in the case of The Locust) or to make sense of the characterisations of fungus (in the case of The Unsung Heroes of the Planet). Ruth Mariner has continued to fuse operatic narrative with nature, anthropomorphising her subjects and searching for characteristic human traits. In 2020 she produced a 10-minute work called Indus on the story of whale evolution. During this piece a solo singer performs as a whale, singing both poetic text about the journey of their evolution towards this large creature and mimicking the sounds of whale calls. This work appears to be far closer to the research carried out in this thesis, although it only involves one singer and as such is closer formally to a cantata than opera. Therefore, there is no exploration of dramatic relationships between different characters in the piece, although the solo singer does embody the whole process of evolution from land mammal to water mammal. On her website Ruth Mariner describes this work as exploring:
the relationship between disability and environment through the unlikely story of whale evolution.
When a land-mammal begins to first explore the water, she finds a place where her differences become strengths, embarking on a journey of self-discovery towards an extraordinary future. (Gestalt Arts, 2018: online)
This blending of a very human experience of disability, with the postulated story of whale evolution has many parallels to the experience and arcs of the characters I have created in this research.
In 2018 Infinite Opera (myself as librettist and composer Daniel Blanco Albert) produced Entanglement! An Entropic Tale. In this the characters are anthropomorphic versions of elements from physics (e.g., an electron, positron, entropy, gravity and a singularity). It connects common human interactions and emotions (love, greed, anger, etc.) with the interactions and forces of physics, providing an alternative and emotional metaphorical toolbox to connect with the complex concepts involved. This piece has laid the groundwork for the explorations and projects undergone in this PhD. In response to reading both The Locust and The Unsung Heroes of the Planet, I introduced a narrator in the form of a scientist to the most recent production of the opera in 2019, to see if this helped in the audience’s comprehension of the work, and to consider the addition of a narrator to future works. Due to the nature of the research the narrator’s role would never be to explain the science presented through the narratives, but rather to provide a sliding gradient between the audience non-human subjects presented on stage. I will discuss this further in subsequent chapters.
The work in this research builds on this growing world of science and theatre, which seeks out new ways to reframe, explore and represent the discoveries of our age. I can see through looking to related works that in my own practice I am part of a wider group of artists, writers and composers who are looking to integrate diverse disciplines into the theatre they create.
Theatre, as an artform that is deeply connected to emotion and often grounded in philosophical or even ethical considerations of a subject, when blended with science can bring about new perspectives on our scientific goals and achievements, present them to wider audiences and give them greater relevance to our daily lives.