ABSTRACT

A majority of contemporary innovative opera stagings can still be described as postmodern design. In the new millennium opera has institutionalized postmodern design, in particular its aesthetic strand of cool beauty, which is a formalist type of beauty that combines abstraction and high fashion with striking effects, a mixing of theatricality and spectacle. Postmodern design of the 1970s and 1980s played with various styles and conventions, emphasizing simplicity and theatricality, but opera never fully relinquished the historical reference or picturesque. Although the neo-avant-garde theatre rediscovered environmental staging and site-specific performance, these approaches were rarely used in opera before 2000. Employing new technologies, video projections, live feeds, digital imagery the opera participates in ongoing cultural and technological shifts, while radically changing the conception and range of scenography within performance. As well as changing aesthetics, construed in a narrow sense, technology and the use of unconventional spaces have pioneered new modes of producing opera.