What about the text? Marking Bodies (or where I really start to confuse you...)
As I examine the body of the castrato, I find myself gravitating away from the archive and looking towards the repertoire. What is the repertoire? In Diana Taylor's study, "The Archive and the Repertoire," she defines it as "[that which] enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing -- in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge" (20). The castrati performed an aria and left the stage and his applauding audience; this ephemeral moment is gone, even when we turn to documented evidence to recreate it.
Is the castrati lost to us forever? I don't believe he needs to be; if we "enact embodied memory," we might arrive at new insights. Let me explain some of my thinking:
When I think about performance, I think about what I personally know best - the poem. How does the poem perform the marked body? The poem is like the body; it is a contained space where things are displayed or concealed through metaphor. Poems utilize metaphor to conceal the reality of an image by making it into another image. The poem re-marks, or draws away from what a thing really is. A castrated body can re-mark through song: when he opens his mouth to sing he is no longer a sexually ambiguous monstrosity but rather an angelic virtuoso. The poet performs the poem (or body as metaphor), the castrati performs the body on stage.
However, both the body of the performer and the poem cannot escape a marked status. A poem is made up of text: our ideas (and inevitably our selves) are contained within the marks of our written language. When we write a poem, which I believe is a performance of self, we are marking ourselves through language. Others can access our performance by looking at the combination of our words or a set of markings. The castrati is marked by the text of the aria he sings: what cruel fate is he singing about now? In response, spectators write back onto both the poem and the performer - they mark.
As I continue to examine the body of the castrato, I find that I am examining myself. Though the poems we write are constrained within the archive, we have the ability to embody a text when we perform them, or read them for a spectator. When words become "live," we hear them, create images, see movement, construct what we believe the poem actually looks like. I can't help but compare reading a poem, or maybe even the artist's act of writing a poem, to performing the body on stage. When we embody a text we change how its fits and sits in the archive. We can disrupt the constraints of a marked body (of text) and re-mark or maybe even un-mark by examining our own marked bodies.
I'm not proposing that there is a way to uncover that precious thing that is cut from history, that which is "severed by the sharp blade of time" (Bergeron 177). I only wish to examine how we perform the archive and how we might understand the body hidden behind the text by looking at how we are constrained or released by our own forms.
Is the castrati lost to us forever? I don't believe he needs to be; if we "enact embodied memory," we might arrive at new insights. Let me explain some of my thinking:
When I think about performance, I think about what I personally know best - the poem. How does the poem perform the marked body? The poem is like the body; it is a contained space where things are displayed or concealed through metaphor. Poems utilize metaphor to conceal the reality of an image by making it into another image. The poem re-marks, or draws away from what a thing really is. A castrated body can re-mark through song: when he opens his mouth to sing he is no longer a sexually ambiguous monstrosity but rather an angelic virtuoso. The poet performs the poem (or body as metaphor), the castrati performs the body on stage.
However, both the body of the performer and the poem cannot escape a marked status. A poem is made up of text: our ideas (and inevitably our selves) are contained within the marks of our written language. When we write a poem, which I believe is a performance of self, we are marking ourselves through language. Others can access our performance by looking at the combination of our words or a set of markings. The castrati is marked by the text of the aria he sings: what cruel fate is he singing about now? In response, spectators write back onto both the poem and the performer - they mark.
As I continue to examine the body of the castrato, I find that I am examining myself. Though the poems we write are constrained within the archive, we have the ability to embody a text when we perform them, or read them for a spectator. When words become "live," we hear them, create images, see movement, construct what we believe the poem actually looks like. I can't help but compare reading a poem, or maybe even the artist's act of writing a poem, to performing the body on stage. When we embody a text we change how its fits and sits in the archive. We can disrupt the constraints of a marked body (of text) and re-mark or maybe even un-mark by examining our own marked bodies.
I'm not proposing that there is a way to uncover that precious thing that is cut from history, that which is "severed by the sharp blade of time" (Bergeron 177). I only wish to examine how we perform the archive and how we might understand the body hidden behind the text by looking at how we are constrained or released by our own forms.
Voicing the Performer
Check in later for some words from real life opera singers!