Writing

“Documentary Opera: Twenty-First Century American Performances of Race and the Archive” explores how embracing the documentary impulse has transformed American opera in the twenty-first century. Amidst the current renaissance of American opera, I identify a trend that I call “documentary opera,” namely operas that engage documentary source materials, techniques, and aesthetics to reimagine narratives of historical figures or current events. Like documentary works in other genres such as film and theater, these operas rely on an interrogation of, and relationship to, the archive; however, they also harness the affordances of opera’s heavily stylized aesthetics to unsettle the notion of the documentary from its conventional presentations, thereby expanding the possibilities of representing reality. While documentary practices have been applied to American opera production since the middle of the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century, many newly composed American documentary operas notably focus on racialized subjects, are composed by creative teams of color, and are programmed as mainstage events, constituting a radical shift in the industry and genre-wide acceptance of diversity. Thus, documentary opera reimagines opera for a twenty-first century American audience by challenging the art form’s long history of exclusion, racism, and inequity.

            Invoking “documentary” in my terminology directly places opera in dialogue with a mode of engaging with, preserving, and representing the real. By coining this term, I open methodological possibilities for studying new opera, suggesting scholarly directions that move beyond an emphasis on what the genre can represent. Through renewed attention to recycled and recontextualized materials, perspectives, and voices, documentary operas suggest new interpretations and engagements with the archive through performance. Moreover, with these works’ emphasis on the narratives of those who have been historically marginalized, the documentary names a productive tension between operatic performance and racial performativity, revealing constructions of racialization in quotidian and heightened aesthetic performance. By focusing on mainstage productions of documentary operas across the United States, I engage with transformations of American opera affecting the industry on every level, from the careers of individual artists to the largest institutions that produce narratives of racial subjugation.

             “Documentary Opera” presents an overview of the growth in the trend over the first twenty-five years of the new millennium. I begin by laying out the theoretical apparatus of “documentary opera,” illustrating how the intersections between documentary, theater and performance, and critical race studies contextualize the growth of the trend amidst the larger backdrop of American opera industry’s reckoning with broader sociopolitical movements. Chapter 1 investigates how opera companies operationalized newly adopted civic priorities in their artistic programming. I interrogate the rhetoric of “community” as promoted in the development, production, and performance of The Refuge (2007) and An American Dream (2015). Chapter 2 turns to the limitations of representing racialized testimonial voices in documentary trial operas. I examine how An American Soldier (2018) and The Central Park Five (2019) redirect critique towards the broader institutional structures that anonymize and silence their victims. Chapter 3 reveals how documentary operas shape knowledge at the limits of the archive. Taking Omar (2022) as a case study, this chapter illustrates how the creators extended Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation to opera. Chapter 4 examines how the narratives of documentary operas have been co-opted by historically white institutions, and reconsiders how opera makes, and remakes, racial identities in performance through a consideration of Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2019) as performed at the Metropolitan Opera in 2021. The Epilogue concludes by returning to the labor at the heart of the documentary opera project.