ABSTRACT
The chapter is devoted to Ficarra and Whittington’s The Empress’s Feet (1995), a work for one unaccompanied voice. This limit case of the operatic is challenging to stage. The work possesses, through the voice, an almost hallucinatory force, and it invokes images, places, and movement that can be explored as emanations of the voice alone. Unfolding as a state hovering between wakefulness and sleep, The Empress’s Feet recounts scenes of sleepwalking in which a strange bond is established between the voice and the wandering body. Its staging reflects this state of dissociation of the voice from the body, taking it to express something important about our experience of the voice in opera: the stage events and happenings are woven out of an invisible voice (a recording played offstage). The voice’s power over the body is intensified by the movements of different performers, among them an acrobat hanging and walking in mid-air, who mirrors the hallucinatory force possessed by the voice.
