Tragedy

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Video still

Single-channel projection with sound | 2015-16 | 157 minutes

The feature-length video Tragedy immerses us in the behind-the-scenes drama of a production of Verdi’s opera La traviata, granting us access to a parallel reality where infrastructure, labor, and desire meet at the edge of the spectacle. Tragedy presents a metadrama: the production of a production. Guided by the music of the two-hour opera, the camera discloses the vast resources required to create this live event—the cost of liveness. It also provides a glimpse into its fragility: so much could go wrong. The camera lingers with the stage managers, follows technicians, stops to catch a glimpse of costume dressers and props personnel getting the performers ready, records whispers and stolen moments, scans a hallway, catches a singer getting ready to step on stage, and conveys the expectation—the waiting and the wanting—written on the performers’ faces. In the process, the camera fleshes itself out, becoming embodied, even intimate and loquacious. Though it brushes up against the institution’s mechanics and the machinery of tradition, it mostly, and most provocatively, focuses on the routine labor around the stage, revealing a choreography of mutual support and the interplay between work culture and “high” culture. In this, it rewrites their grand narratives.

  • Co-production with Opera North, Leeds

Credits

  • Performers:
    Cast, chorus, and crew of the Opera North Company

  • Cinematographer:
    Margaret Salmon

  • Opera North producer:
    Dominic Gray

  • Field producer:
    Will Rose

  • Sound recording:
    Tom Sedgewick

  • Editing:
    Mathieu Bouchard-Malo

  • Sound mix:
    Benjamin Hurd

  • Color grading:
    Sue Giovanni

  • Funding:
    Opera North, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the University of Hertfordshire

Video still

Act 1 Excerpt

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