Contaminating the Opera Genre: ‘Lo Specchio Magico’ (Urban Art Dance Opera)

“Le storie sono sempre convergenze di diverse nature” (“Stories are always convergences of different natures”), stated Aldo Nove illustrating the idea behind Fabio Vacchi’s opera Lo Specchio Magico (Urban Art Dance Opera), which premiered at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino last May and for which Nove wrote the libretto.

Indeed, the concepts of convergence and contamination – «contamination as energy», the opera poster reads – shaped Lo Specchio Magico’s aesthetics: if the opera genre is, by definition, the result of a contamination between artistic expressions, with his project Vacchi enriched this century-long dialogue by including new popular languages, such as rap music and street art.

The Florentine rapper Millelemmi – the storyteller of Lo Specchio Magico – interacted with opera singers and the chorus by mixing hip-hop and Sprechgesang, a style of vocalization intermediate between speech and song, typical of the historical avant-garde. The direction was entrusted to the live performance of street artist Moby Dick: for the entire duration of the opera, he worked on a mural in the amphitheatric open space above the theatre and his performance was filmed and projected inside in real time.

There were then two audiences: the one inside, attending live to the opera and watching the outside performance broadcasted, and the outside spectators, who listened to the music transmitted from the inside, while watching Moby Dick’s performance live. Multimediality thus connected the two stages and narrations, which were also linked by Filippo Coffano Andreoli’s performance as the protagonist, dancing in and outside of the theatre.

Beside pushing the boundaries between tradition and innovation, Lo Specchio Magico also combined artistic pleasure and social activism, appealing to the audience’s dual identity of spectators and citizens. Lo Specchio Magico’s production actively supported the organization Sea Shepherd, devoted to protecting marine life. One of their trimaran was moored in Viareggio and open to the public on the day of the performance; moreover, the CEOs of the organization were among the audience and participated in a press conference together with Vacchi. Finally, Moby Dick’s mural represented cetaceans, among other animals, as a hymn to the beauty of nature as well as a tribute to Sea Shepherd’s mission.

Artistic elaboration and socio-political issues were further combined in Aldo Nove’s libretto. Fictional characters from the film Dances with Wolves stand aside historical figures such as Dionysus of Syracuse, and Aung San Suu Kyi; elements typical of the fable, such as the magical mirror of the title, were employed to retold history, from the fall of the Roman Empire to Hiroshima.

The idea of convergence is key to understanding how this experiment was driven by a centrifugal, rather than centripetal force. The model for this contamination was not the postmodern pastiche which reuses popular, mass-mediated imagery to explode the meaning in a wordplay. Instead, the goal was to restore a link between stylistic research and communication with the audience, enjoyment and social engagement. Vacchi and Nove rejected a cerebral, experimental language in favour of that sensual pleasure which originally made opera an artistic form enjoyable for all. Additionally, to communicate with a vast audience, they chose an engaging, universal message of cosmic love and respect.

Such belief in the constructive power of art posited the authors among the ones “who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values” (David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, 1993). Naive or brave, though, Lo Specchio Magico did bring something new to the discussion over convergence culture in the Italian artistic panorama.