Sarah Hibberd, Richard Strivens and Antonia Pereira
We will discuss aspects of the presentation and representation of singers in contemporary Britain, early 20C Germany and 19C Paris. The seminar will be followed by tea and refreshments in the Theatre Bar. All welcome.
Antonia Pereira
Antonia Pereira is a fourth-year PhD student at Bristol, funded by the AHRC. In her doctoral project, she is investigating how British and Irish opera companies have performed and engaged with Orientalist operas since 2020. While opera has long been acknowledged to be problematic in its representation, both textual and performative, of Global Majority people and cultures, it is only recently – notably in the wake of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, and the Stop Asian Hate protests in 2021-22 – that mainstage opera companies have begun to engage meaningfully with these critiques; she looks at the different ways in which they go about presenting Orientalist works in this climate. Her methodological framework draws upon postcolonial studies, scholarship on operatic exoticism, contemporary opera performance, and music and race. She also takes an ethnographic approach, conducting interviews with people involved in these productions, such as members of the creative team, cast, and any academic consultants. Antonia has presented her work at the SWW DTP Summer Research Festival, the III International Conference of the Associació Valenciana de Musicologia, the Poetic Ecosystems symposium at the University of Bristol, and the Word, Image, Scene, and Digital Transformations summer school at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
Richard Strivens
Richard Strivens is a PhD researcher at Bristol, supervised by Sarah Hibberd and Steffan Davies. His research is into the bass-clef roles of the Strauss operas, investigating the relationship between Strauss and the singers he composed for. Given the nature of these roles, his research focuses on how patriarchy (or hegemonic masculinity) is represented by these roles. Richard teaches singing. His interest in singing and performance on stage is both historic and current, in particular as founder and co-artistic director of Manchester Contemporary Opera, which gives opportunities to early career and young opera makers to collaborate in creating and performing new opera.
Sarah Hibberd
Sarah Hibberd is Stanley Hugh Badock Chair of Music at Bristol. Her research focuses on opera in Paris, London and Naples during the first half of the nineteenth century, and her publications include French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, 2009), a guest-edited special issue of 19th-Century Music ‘Music and Science in London and Paris’ (2015), and Berlioz and His World, co-edited with Francesca Brittan (Chicago, 2024). She has just finished a book on French Opera and the Revolutionary Sublime and is working on a group of Italian opera singers known as the Puritani Quartet. She is co-editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal.