ABSTRACT
In 2003 I attended a performance of Michel van der Aa’s opera One (2002), which has only one singer on the stage. Soprano Barbara Hannigan, looking identical to her life-size two-dimensional video, confronts the representation of herself throughout the piece: a projected singing body and a live singing body represent each other, and their mutual representations are at the same time complementary and deconstructive. Despite the mimetic relationship between a live performing body and its video double, the live and the projected images were always clearly distinguishable. In the sphere of sound/music, however, it was sometimes difficult to detect what was live singing and what was pre-recorded sound projected on stage. The impossibility of clearly distinguishing the pre-recorded from the live voice makes the relationship between the two fluctuating and dynamic, and the same goes for the relationship between the voice and the body, since the conventional forms of their mutual representation change significantly. The result is extremely virtuosic singing because the physical body “competes” with the machine, whose performance goes beyond the physical capabilities of a performing human body. That relationship between body and machine creates a kind of vocal “alloy” consisting of live and pre-recorded components. Such a vocal result “outgrows” the performing body: since the body singing live is not sufficient to produce the vocal result that Van der Aa envisaged, the technologically enhanced voice appears beyond the physical limits and capacity of the vocal apparatus of the singing body.
