Some performances available in the Met Opera on Demand catalogue include offensive racial and cultural depictions and stereotypes. The issues are varied—from offensive past production practices such as blackface, brownface, and yellowface makeup to racist cultural depictions within the texts of the operas themselves. We continue to make these performances available because we believe they constitute an important part of the company’s artistic legacy. The Met is committed to addressing these vital issues in our programming, whether archival or in the future.
Surely any academic reader of this caveat will be struck by its vexed meditation on art, music, history, futurity, and the politics of representation. But what does this “advisory” fail to warn us about? And how might our immersion in or critical distance from musical performance inform a nuanced critique of racialized spectacle? The Drama and Performance Forum and the Opera and Musical Performance Forum jointly propose a panel that will address these important questions.
“The Politics of Performance: Race in American Musical Theatre and Opera” explores the life and afterlife of racist and racialized representations in opera and American musical theatre, while simultaneously conjuring both historical and contemporary sites of resistance or repetition with a difference. Asking “how do music and performance work as citational systems to re-invent, repeat, or erase a past?” the panel probes the nebulous territory between initiating new possibilities of signification and reinscribing traumatic/aesthetic histories. The three papers selected will enter into dialogue with a range of sources, including Todd Decker’s Showboat: Performing Race in an American Musical (2012), Naomi André’s Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (2018), Pamela Karantonis and Dylan Robinson’s collection Opera Indigene: Re/presenting First Nations and Indigenous Culture (2011), and Lyra D. Monteiro’s “Race-Conscious Casting and The Erasure of the Black Past” (2016).
The first paper explores performances from a century ago. “In Voice, Face, and Body: Will Marion Cook’s New Negro Renaissance Theatre,” Paul Edwards focuses his analysis on Negro Nuances—a dramatic work about the African Diaspora produced by the famed Black theatre-maker Will Marion Cook in 1924. Cook’s production imagined a new kind of Black theatre: one that would not only stage the traumatic history of Black life in America, but also revivify forgotten legacies of Black performance. Cook used a multigenerational cohort of performers to embody his vision and offered strategies for staging Blackness that differed starkly from those of his contemporaries, including Eugene O’Neill (in The Emperor Jones).
The second paper explores contemporary performances of past material. In “Can Showboat (or Peter Pan or West Side Story) Be Saved?” Bradley Rogers looks to recent productions of problematic material written in and after the 1920s. Focusing on attempts to rehabilitate racist representations, Rogers analyzes production histories of shows including Peter Pan and West Side Story. A recent production of the former, for example, cast a member of the Cherokee Nation as Tiger Lily, while West Side Story’s 2009 revival used new Spanish lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda and cast Latinx performers. Rogers explains why the formal structure of musical theatre—with its investment in cross-racial performance—struggles to accommodate these solutions, and he looks forward to more radical ones such as those deployed in Daniel Fish’s recent revival of Oklahoma!
The third paper shifts focus to contemporary work written in light of the histories explored by Edwards and Rogers. In “Whose Story Is This?: Indigenous Narratives and the Unsettling of North American Opera,” Rena Roussin explores how twenty-first-century producers have sought to acknowledge and repair musical performance’s racist past. Drawing on three case studies: City Opera Vancouver and Pacific Opera’s joint production of Brian Current’s Missing (2017); Tapestry Opera’s production of Dean Burry’s Shanawdithit (2019); and The Industry’s production of Du Yun’s and Raven Chacon’s Sweet Land (2020), Roussin illuminates the recent history of engagement between producers and Indigenous collaborators and suggests how North American opera might better unsettle colonialism and promote Native American resurgence.
Our participants have been chosen not only because their work collectively spans histories and genres of musical performance but also because of their individual disciplinary perspectives: Edwards works in American Studies; Rogers in theatre history; Roussin in musicology. Each will be limited to twenty minutes to leave ample time to discuss the histories of opera and musical theatre as well as their future in performance. The panel will be moderated by representatives of the co-sponsoring forums.