Benjamin Davis
Staging As One: reflections on multimodal creative enquiry, intersemiotic translation, and liminality
As One – the 2014 transgender-themed opera by Laura Kaminsky written for string quartet and two voices, with a libretto by Kimberley Reed and Mark Campbell – has received over 50 different staged productions since its world premiere in the USA, making it one of the most produced contemporary operas this century. In fifteen songs and an accompanying film, the opera traces the experiences of its transgender protagonist, an imagined persona loosely based on the life of film-maker Kimberley Reed.
In this paper, I reflect on my experience as a creative practitioner-researcher and stage director of the UK premiere (and 47th production) of As One at the Warehouse in Waterloo in 2021, conducted by the Cuban-born champion of female composers and Artistic Director of Lontano Festival of American Music in London, Odaline de la Martínez. Simon Wallfisch performed the baritone role of ‘Hannah Before’ and Arlene Rolph the mezzo-soprano role ‘Hannah After’.
In search of authenticity, under the festival banner of Diversity, and for the first time in the opera’s performance history, we cast a transgender woman dancer – Jarry Glavin – as a third aspect of the central protagonist, naming her ‘Liminal Hannah’ in our production. Through intermedial, embodied and situated staging of the work, we explored the opera’s use of dialogue as a theatrical conceit to represent the truth of personal experience.
This paper frames acts of multimodal translation as creative enquiry, as an expressive and performative response to personal encounter with text, and as exploration of kinetic and material vocabularies for the in-between, transitional, or liminal. The paper will assert the value of dialogical spaces and living inquiry as a form of practice-as-research, as well as the importance of boundary-testing through performative translation and contemporary (re-)telling of stories which explore the evolving codes and subject of gender.
Lontano Festival website: https://www.lontano.co.uk/event3-5-6
Davis, B. (Forthcoming in 2023). Semi-staging Written On Skin: an experiment in the ‘doubleness’ of lived experience and unfolding performative invention. In Wiley, C. & Gouzouasis, P. (Eds), The Routledge Companion to Autoethnography and Self-Reflexivity in Music Studies. London: Routledge.
Davis, B. (2021). Staging Ariodante: Cultural Cartographies and Dialogical Performance. In Williams, J. & Horlor, S. (Eds), Musical Spaces: Place, Performance, and Power. MA, USA: Jenny Stanford Publishing.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.1201/9781003180418-22/staging-ariodante-cultural-cartographies-dialogical-performance-benjamin-davis
Davis, B. (2020). ‘Performing realism’: A practice-led study of contemporary realism in the staging of opera. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University.
https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/130179/
Bio:
Benjamin Davis studied English and related literature at the University of York and an MA in Theatre Directing at Goldsmiths’ College, London before becoming a staff director at Welsh National Opera from 2001-2011. He has since worked as a freelance opera director for regional and national opera companies and festivals in the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Canada, North America, and China. His doctoral thesis was a practice-based study on Performing Realism in contemporary opera productions, sponsored by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Opera and Drama (CIRO), Cardiff University. He is an Associate Researcher at Cardiff and has also taught at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, University of the Arts London, and at Wales Academy of Voice and Dramatic Arts, University of Wales Trinity Saint David.