Paper and Performance for Cultures in the Anthropocene.

The lecture-performance will consist of recorded and live-performed excerpts of music from Young’s Making Tellus and put forward Munn’s performer-librettist-environmentalist’s sketch of an operatic performance practice for the Anthropocene. This performance practice hinges on the question: Can new and canonic opera help us understand and navigate the Anthropocene? As western classical music’s largest form, opera can be understood as a self-mythologizing narrative generated by the power of the state and capital. As such, is it redeemable as a form to critically engage with the Anthropocene and the histories that produce it, or is it a set of tools for audiences to perform self-reflection without altering exploitative inter-and-intra-species relationships? The proposed performance practice will unfold from excerpts of the forthcoming Making Tellus and of canonic cosmologically-oriented operas, Wagner’s Parsifal and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.