Opera Indigene: Re/presenting First Nations and Indigenous Cultures

Pamela Karantonis is Senior Lecturer in Voice at Bath Spa University, UK. She is a Convenor of the Music Theatre Working Group of The International Federation for Theatre Research. She is joint editor and contributing author for Cathy Berberian: Pioneer of Contemporary Vocality (Ashgate, 2014) and The Legacy of Opera (2013). Dylan Robinson has held research positions as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music and as a Visiting Scholar in Canadian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently working on a book that investigates the degree to which musical reconciliation in Canada reflects a process of restorative justice. His research theorizes how Indigenous epistemology and worldviews might impact upon the re-telling of music history in North America.

Contents: Introduction, Pamela Karantonis and Dylan Robinson; Part I Critical and Comparative Contexts: Opera's Colonizing Force and Decolonizing Potential: Orpheus conquistador, Nicholas Till; Decentering opera: early 21st-century indigenous production, Beverley Diamond; 'Singing from the margins': postcolonial themes in Voss and Waiting for the Barbarians, Michael Halliwell; Performativity mimesis, and indigenous opera, Pamela Karantonis. Part II Australian Perspectives: 'To didj or not to didj': exploring indigenous representation in Australian music theater works by Margaret Sutherland and Andrew Schultz, Anne Boyd; Giving voice to the un-voiced 'witch' and the 'heart of nothingness': Moya Henderson's Lindy, Linda Kouvaras; The Eighth Wonder: explorations of place and voice, Anne Power. Part III Indianism in the Americas: Indianismo in Brazilian romantic opera: shifting ideologies of national foundation, Maria Alice Volpe; Native songs, Indianist styles and the process of music idealization, Tara Browner; Composed and produced in the American West, 1912-1913: two operatic portrayals of First Nations cultures, Catherine Parsons Smith. Part IV Canadian Perspectives: Assimilation, integration, and individuation: the evolution of First Nations musical citizenship in Canadian opera, Mary I. Ingraham; 'Too much white man in it': aesthetic colonization in Tzinquaw, Alison Greene; Peaceful surface and monstrous depths: Barbara Pentland and Dorothy Livesay's The Lake, Dylan Robinson; The politics of genre: exposing historical tensions in Harry Somers's Louis Riel, Coleen L. Renihan. Part V New Creation and Collaborative Processes: Creating Pimooteewin, Robin Elliott; After McPhee: Evan Ziporyn's A House in Bali, Victoria Vaughan; West coast First Peoples and The Magic Flute: Tracing the journey of a cross-cultural collaboration, Robert McQueen interviewed by Dylan Robinson, with responses by Cathi Charles Wherry and Tracey Herbert, Lorna Williams, and Marion Newman; P