Least Like The Other: Searching for Rosemary Kennedy (75’)
- Submitting institution
-
University of Ulster
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 86159869
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- July
- Year
- 2019
- URL
-
https://ulster.sharepoint.com/:b:/s/REF2021/EeQP93q1Q-lNg8llAu2Mi5oBqmKYuFCN5w93NC7skn76wQ?e=oaVvCR
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
D - Arts practices, practice-as-research
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- 'Least Like the Other: Searching for Rosemary Kennedy' is an opera which was five years in the making. Three years were spent researching and collecting archival materials, and the scale of the final production demanded a team of over 100 technical and creative minds drawn from multiple different fields including, video artists, costume makers, repetiteurs, set designers, lighting designers, sound technicians, recording engineers, sound mixers, video operators, production managers, photographers, hair and make-up artists, set constructors, actors, singers, improvisers, contemporary classical musicians, conductors and choreographers. It is a large-scale fusion of multiple art forms stemming from a single composer-driven idea.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Dissemination:
Multi-media opera for large ensemble, improvisors, mezzo soprano, film and three
actors, commissioned by Irish National Opera. World premiere: Galway International Arts festival, Black Box Theatre, Galway, Ireland 19 July 2019 conducted by Brian Irvine and Fergus Sheil.
Aims and Context:
The work 'Least Like The Other: Searching for Rosemary Kennedy (75’)' aims to reimagine opera as a vehicle for illuminating an obscured, yet important historical event, the lobotomy of JFK’s sister Rosemary Kennedy, by dismissing the common form of libretto and replacing it with verbatim materials from historical archives, personal letters and diary entries. It also sets out to reinvent the role of the ensemble within an operatic context, combining two diametrically opposed ensembles, one performing fixed material and one devoted solely to disruption.
Methodology and findings:
By layering these separately-controlled ensembles - a composer-directed trio of improvisers and a separate conductor controlled 12-piece ensemble (who read from a fixed score) - the work embraces notions of disruption and simultaneity as a mechanism for investigation and interrogation. These ensembles also interact with a narrator, two actors, sampled public information films and an improvising projection-based visual artist, allowing a network of simultaneous dialogues to exist eg speeches are sung, recited, projected and disrupted all at once.
Conductor 1 conducts the fixed material of the large ensemble and solo singer, whilst conductor 2 (the composer) uses his own developed language of conduction to control improvisers creating real time material in reaction to the musical/visual landscape that is being presented at any given moment. The work’s post-modern sound world draws from 1920s jazz, industrial minimalism, classical modernism, popular song and dysfunctional playback. This musical “culture jamming” allows a resonance and dialogue to emerge between early 20th-century attitudes and understanding of intelligence, Catholicism, disability and politics, and current social and political thinking.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -