Referencing 21st multimedia performance practice.

Course discussions explore the history, and social impact of conceptual thinking behind post-modernism. This area of the course looks to develop the student's abilities to reference cultural and conceptual contexts, and approaches in 21st multimedia performance practice in their own work. It explores the social contexts of post modern ideas in multimedia performance, and takes the form of discussions that happen as course work and material evolves.

Discussions are aimed at stimulating informed new work. Through their creative activities students will drive forward post modern thinking as a way of bringing new contexts to their work. Students will be encouraged to create dynamic relationships between sound, the visual and theatre arts to reach far with their productions, and also investigate contemporary opera's potential in the wider contexts of multimedia art, and performing arts practice.

Discussions will cover a wide variety of original multimedia practitioners, composers and visual artists, whose work has shaped 21st multimedia performance, such as Oscar Schlemmer, Pina Bausch and Wim Vandekeybus.

This course provides a unique experimental research space in which multimedia can be explored as a way of recontemporarising, and recontextualisating the arts, media, and notions of cultural identity.

By developing techniques, and processes through informed creative responses, this course explores the role multimedia performance can play in the creation of new ideas, and the practice of them.

To paraphrase Vasily Grossman, the Russian writer: New ideas are fundamental to any real true democratic state, as they are the catalytic fuel which drives it: the practice of new ideas is the only way we have to enable a democratic society to break open the neuroses of social repetition which breeds unrest and inequality.

Students will develop their abilities to think outside the box, to break free from polarized conventions of arts practice by bringing together the areas in art that can push multimedia performance and opera in new directions. This approach can be compared in much the same sense in the way dance theatre and physical theatre has broken free from classical ballet and mainstream theatre.

Students will develop creative, and production processes from these discussions that will hlpe them propel multimedia performance, opera and their post modern properties across cultural, and social boundaries, to generate new heightened performed experiences, cultural and social connections.

A discussion theme: Opera as mulitmedia performance.

The sometimes polarized nature of mainstream opera means that it is often seen as a living museum to which it very occasionally adds a new exhibit. Although this is an unquestionably an important contribution to culture, current opera practice tends to absorb ideas in its own image, somehow dismantling its influences into its conventions, rather than opera being absorbed the other way round, into a new image, whereby, its roots, conventions, and plasticity are transcended as part of a wider cultural vocabulary of contemporary multimedia performance.

The contemporary "living" nature of multimedia performance can disguise its references more readily than opera as we think of it. Multimedia is free of the social grandeur and convention of opera. This concentration on the plasticity of opera and its traditions i.e staging, approach to text, its perceived social and cultural position, and of course its vocal conventions, can detract from its real educational, and enlightening properties for the greater good of education, and society's continuous thirst to understand, and reinvent itself. Because opera is arguably more consumed by itself, i.e self-consciously created through its traditions, making it somehow removed from modern society, the valuable ideas inherent in it, and its influential properties, largely get left behind in mainstream eduction: perceived as stagnated and aloof form real life, and as a consequence its abilities as an art form to filter back into society through the normal wider modes of cultural filtering are inhibited.

Contemporary opera practice is often too consumed by this concentration on reliving its plasticity and conventions, as opposed to unlimiting itself to play a wider, questioning role in a wider relevant contemporary arts debate.

At the same there are no formal methods of teaching opera creation outside of an image of itself (like that of the salon), through an objective position in education. As a result education in creating opera is left, in the hands of composers with no formal visual arts or theatre training, often in collaboration with choreographers and writers, who themselves are coming from relatively polarized positions, with no formal experience of the full dynamics of multimedia in history.

Because of this commissioned work can disappear all too quickly, unpopular, perceived as limited work unable to get beyond these inhibiting factors, unable to really challenge opera or make any new real, exciting, fresh context for opera, that breaks its boundaries and conventions down beyond that of operas own image and history of itself. This is a problem for mainstream music education where no deeper, established roots in the resources that an education in post modern multimedia has to offer, are formally being applied early in the development of a student composer's approach to multimedia writing.

Much of opera production is modeled on "musically digested", or applied understanding of theatre, where there is little opportunity to really integrate opera with current multimedia practice in dance theatre and post-modern visual art. Composers on the whole are not writing these works. Or at least this is how it can seem. This is all part of the debate. As a musical form music education needs to step into a visual arts and modern dance theatre realm, adopting its creative approaches to the fundamental principles of cross-platform structures, influences and cultural approaches, to address the balances and hidden post modern relationships between media, that opera, as a multimedia art form needs to evolve.

Opera, all too often can be seen like a specialist friend who is great on their own turf, in their own extensive community, but is rude by default because he or she will not step out into company outside their own personal experience, because they lack the emotional and social references to cope outside their position in their own social hierarchy.

Areas of discussion and investigation covered include:

Approaches to creativity, Bauhaus, Dada, Situationalism, Post-modernism, Conceptual art, Contemporary opera, Northern European Dance Theatre, Experimental film, Accidental Space, Architecture, Sculpture, Design, Post modern philosophy in visual art,Post modern philosophy in music and opera, Technology,Commercialism.