Magnificat

Click to continue reading “To Draw from a Thousand Hearts a Thousand Sighs”

(This is the second of a three part essay on Francesca Caccini and La Liberzione di Ruggiero, which Magnificat will perform October 16-18. The first part, a biographical sketch of Francesca, "About Francesca", was posted here earlier.) On February 3, 1625, sometime in daylight, 160 gentildonne and their husbands, and an unknown number of foreign guests rode in carriages out the southeastern gate of Florence, and half a mile up a tree-lined avenue to a villa atop the nearest hill that had very recently been renovated as the personal palace of Tuscany’s regent, Archduchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria. Leaving their carriages in a grassy courtyard guarded by two squadrons of armed cavalry, the Archduchess’ guests were welcomed into the palace by a military commander, and led to bench seats in a temporary theatre built in the villa’s loggia, to hear a new commedia in musica based on a well-known plot (two sorceresses ...

Chloe Veltman recently posted an interesting commentary on the notion of "site specific theatre" with reference to the recent production of Dido and Aeneas by San Francisco's Urban Opera ("Not All Site Specific Theatre is Created Equal"). She proposed that "in order for a theatrical production to be site specific, it needs to be conceived specifically for the space in which it is produced," and therefore "space becomes a performer, with the potential to change the entire relationship between text, visuals, sounds and the human body in fascinating ways." In the context of her article I personally like her narrow definition, but it got me thinking that since any work of performance art exists only in the moment of performance, each performance is in some sense a new work, created freshly in a new "site" and therefore "site specific" for that performance. Of course what Chloe was refering to with her definition ...