Transgressive Duality in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Monteverdi's L'incordonazione

Home , Viola (Twelfth Night)

“WHILE I SEE YOU”: TRANSGRESSIVE DUALITY IN SHAKESPEARE’S TWELFTH

NIGHT AND MONTEVERDI’S L’INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA

Ivey Barr

APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Mihai Nadin, Chair

______xtine burrough

Ivey Barr

NIGHT AND MONTEVERDI’S L’INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA

IVEY BARR, BA

THESIS

Presented to the Faculty of

The University of Texas at Dallas

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

MASTER OF FINE ARTS IN

ARTS, TECHNOLOGY, AND EMERGING COMMUNICATION

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS

May 2020 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to extend my special gratitude for the support of Dr. Mihai Nadin as a fellow outside-the-box ATEC practitioner who allowed and encouraged me to explore music and videography in my graduate studies. His courses on aesthetics, semiotics, and interactivity, and his deep appreciation for the humanities and fine arts, gave me a space to settle and explore the intersection of my own interests in arts and technology. Thanks also to my other committee members, Prof. xtine burrough and Prof. Cassini Nazir, for their expertise in interaction design, their flexibility in joining my committee, and their willingness to observe and judge an unusual

ATEC piece.

I would also like to thank Dr. Kathryn Evans, who helped me begin my formal study of opera and without whom I would not have even considered graduate school, and Prof. Todd Fechter, who helped arrange my scholarship and TA work to make this degree possible.

Lastly, thanks to Teddi Strassburger for her incredible support, listening, proofreading, and time management help; to camera operator Nathan Jensen for filming; and to Avanti Dey for helping me find a venue from which to perform in these uncertain times.

March 2020

iv “WHILE I SEE YOU”: TRANSGRESSIVE DUALITY IN SHAKESPEARE’S TWELFTH

NIGHT AND MONTEVERDI’S L’INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA

Ivey Barr, MFA The University of Texas at Dallas, 2020

ABSTRACT

Supervising Professor: Mihai Nadin

Viola, the principal character of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, presents herself as a “eunuch” or castrato singer to pass as male after surviving a shipwreck. By doing so, she places herself in conversation with the operatic tradition of women in travesti (disguised or crossdressed) male roles, which developed from the popularity of the castrato singer. In this project, I illustrate that

Viola represents a transgressive unity of contradictory selves by arranging both castrato and soprano pieces from Claudio Monteverdi’s early opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea as musical settings for three of Viola’s monologues. Further exploring the overlap between binaries, I revisit the doubling practices of early opera, such as Monteverdi’s work, which called for one virtuosic singer to play two or more contrasting roles, by digitally doubling my/Viola’s voice and body to create two-person scenes between her masculine and feminine aspects, representing her feminine onscreen and performing her masculine onstage alongside the filmed performance. This project, created from the liminal overlap of all these categories - live and digital, male and female, music and text, real and constructed - illustrates a cohesive whole that embraces the transgressive duality present within a single entity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………………………. iv ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………………………………. v

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………… 1

CHAPTER 2 VIOLA IN TWELFTH NIGHT …………………………………………………. 4

CHAPTER 3 VIOLA’S MUSIC ……………………………………………………………… 11

CHAPTER 4 VIOLA IN PERFORMANCE …………………………………………………. 14

WORKS CITED ……………………………………………………………………………….. 17

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH …………………………………………………………………... 18

CURRICULUM VITAE

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Viola, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, first appears onstage having lost her identical twin brother, Sebastian. Immediately, she creates a male persona for herself - Cesario, a musician and supposed eunuch, who finds work as a page to Duke Orsino and is sent by Orsino to woo the countess Olivia for him. Olivia falls in love with Viola-as-Cesario, Viola herself falls in love with Orsino, and in the end, Viola’s supposedly-dead brother turns up alive to resolve the love triangle.

By presenting herself as a eunuch singer, Viola casts herself within a musical tradition that was already well-established by Shakespeare’s time: that of the castrato, a male singer castrated to maintain a high soprano voice. Such singers were common both in the church and in the emerging genre of opera (Feldman 6). In Italy, where Claudio Monteverdi was pioneering the development of opera, castrati were the stars of the stage from the mid-1500s up until the late

1700s, playing heroes, kings, and warriors, and sometimes the secondary roles of young boys and servants. (Feldman 11) Alongside the castrati stars were female singers called travesti

(“disguised”, or alternatively, “crossdressed”), occasionally stepping in for the castrati’s heroic roles, but more often singing the secondary roles.1

Monteverdi’s final opera, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, featured 11 singers playing 28 total roles - among them two leading castrati, as the villainous emperor Nerone and the powerful

1 For a further summary of the history of castrati and travesti roles, see the beginning of Margaret Reynold’s article “Ruggiero’s Deceptions, Cherubino’s Distractions.” 1

Cupid-figure Amore, and two leading sopranos, as Nerone’s mistress Poppea and his despised wife Ottavia. (Schneider 260) As a supposed eunuch, Viola assigns herself the same voice as the men who sang Nerone and Amore, while her role in the narrative structure of the play merges the female roles of the yearning Ottavia and the quick-witted Poppea.

With Viola presenting herself in-text as a castrato, I sought to create a musical dimension to her speeches that encompassed both castrato and soprano music of the period. I selected pieces sung by Monteverdi’s primary characters - Nerone, Amore, Poppea, and Ottavia - and set three of Viola’s speeches to the music. Monteverdi’s style of writing is monologue-like, somewhere between song and speech, and Shakespeare’s text is rhythmic in its poetry. As a noble character,

Viola speaks almost exclusively in verse, not prose, and follows a consistent iambic rhythm in her lines which lends itself to the recitative accompagnato style of Monteverdi’s music. To further underscore Viola’s simultaneous male/female personae, I framed each speech as a duet, splitting lines as appropriate between Viola’s internal monologue and what might be said by her public-facing, masculine persona Cesario. In presentation, I sang Viola’s side of the duets as a prerecorded video performance, in which I appeared in feminine costume, and Cesario’s side as a live performer in masculine costume in duet with the recording, creating a duality of gendered bodies and voices that still belong to a single actor, just as both of Viola’s personas are aspects of her whole self. This duality also echoes the doubling practice common in operatic performance in Monteverdi’s time, in which a single virtuosic singer would appear in multiple contrasting roles, providing “opportunities for quick-change artistry and virtuoso acting... and could also promote allegorical meanings” (Schneider 255). Rather than appear as two characters via quick- changes offstage, I appear doubled digitally.

The performance produced thus brings multiple sets of binaries into a liminal overlap that shows how much they share. Monteverdi’s speechlike music becomes the setting for

Shakespeare’s rhythmic text; Viola’s double bodies and voices are identical despite their contrasting guises; the live performance and the recorded video become a single conversation

(which, in an unexpected recursiveness Shakespeare would have appreciated, was itself livestreamed due to COVID-19 distancing measures). Creating art from this liminal commonality between binaries illustrates the cohesive whole that comes from the transgressive embracing of duality within the singular entity - male and female, music and theatre, art and reality.

CHAPTER 2

VIOLA IN TWELFTH NIGHT

Viola is one of three major female characters who crossdress in the Shakespearean canon.

The others are Portia in Merchant of Venice, who disguises herself as a male lawyer to win her fiancé’s case, and Rosalind in As You Like It, who courts her love interest Orlando while disguised as a shepherd boy. Portia never comments on her experience of presenting male, seeing it as a useful device for her own ends but not growing as a character by the experience. Rosalind, on the other hand, spends lines and lines of the play exploring the conflict and confluence between her masculine and feminine, slipping deeper into one or the other as the occasion demands, revisiting her feminine through the eyes of her masculine, and only setting aside the disguise when her wedding is in sight. In the epilogue - a speech seldom assigned to female characters, which Rosalind notes - she calls herself “the lady” and then says, “if I were a woman”, existing beyond the scope of the narrative in a liminal, genderfluid state.2

Where Portia finds utility and Rosalind finds freedom, Viola finds mostly conflict. No sooner has she obtained work in her masculine persona than Orsino places his trust in her, creating a bond of vulnerability that leads Viola to love him. This is an apparently homoerotic relationship that is not uncommon in Renaissance work, but which cannot be socially consummated as Viola desires (“myself would be his wife”, Shakespeare 1.14.292). Orsino, trusting Viola-Cesario as his page/voice, sends her to woo Olivia on his behalf. Viola attempts to

2 For more on Rosalind, gender, and the performance of gender, see my previous 2019 paper “‘Much Virtue in If’: Unstable Female Masculinity in Shakespeare’s As You Like It”.

deliver Orsino’s words, which are refused by Olivia. She falls into a more improvisatory, participatory duet of flirtation with Olivia, and pursues Viola-Cesario as a more responsive, listening partner than the distant and insistent Orsino. Viola, realizing her position between her female and male love interests, neither of whom can see her full self, laments that her disguise is

“a wickedness” (2.2.684) and labels the situation “too hard a knot for me to untie.” (2.2.698)

Viola’s canonical “other half,” her identical twin brother Sebastian, is a relatively minor character in comparison with his sister. His sole purpose in the narrative is to confuse characters who only know Viola-Cesario and to offer an acceptably cismasculine alternative to Viola-

Cesario’s transgressive instability: he fights a duel with a man who intended to challenge Cesario

(who was a less aggressive, untrained opponent), and marries Olivia, who thinks she is marrying

Cesario.

With Sebastian existing as the cismasculine version of Viola, some productions have experimented with casting a single actor in both roles. This emphasizes their sameness, but leads to a dissatisfying final scene, where both characters must be onstage at once. Some productions bring on an extra to play one twin for that one scene; others have the single actor play both roles, moving from spot to spot, for a more comic effect (Kling 56-57).

However, the unsatisfying nature of the final scene persists, regardless of production.

Every seeming resolution is full of problems. Viola loses both her relationship with Olivia and the social freedom she gained from her disguise and changes her relationship with Orsino from servant/master to wife/husband. Orsino, having shown up with the full intent of continuing to court Olivia, abruptly turns his affection to Viola, who until now has been his male servant and confidant. Likewise, Sebastian must abandon his recent homoerotic relationship with his rescuer

to remain Olivia’s husband, though Olivia intended to marry Viola-Cesario. Olivia makes no protest when that incredible miscommunication is revealed, and embraces Viola as a platonic

“sister” (5.1.2534). The appearance of an acceptably-male proxy for Viola magically extinguishes both Olivia’s transgressive attraction to Cesario and Orsino’s unwelcome attraction to Olivia and transforms Orsino’s love for his page-confidant into socially-appropriate attraction to a woman he can marry. The seeming happiness of the ending is deeply distorted in comparison to the playful fluidity of the previous scenes.

At the beginning of the play, Olivia has vowed to stay veiled and concealed within her house for seven years, in mourning for her own recently-deceased brother. Yet the moment

Viola-Cesario asks, she unveils herself, and asks “is’t not well done?”, inviting Viola-Cesario not only to see her but to tell her how she is seen. Viola responds that she is beautiful, teases her about makeup, compares her to a work of art, and describes how she herself would court Olivia.

Olivia’s response - “You might do much. What is your parentage?” - reveals how quickly she has fallen for this pageboy. Where Orsino’s male gaze seeks to see Olivia only to defeat her concealment and obtain her, Viola’s “butch” gaze requests to see Olivia to understand and respond to her. Jami Ake describes the magic of Viola-Cesario and Olivia’s participatory courtship, in contrast to Orsino’s prescribed Petrarchan “page” of text:

Specifically, Viola spontaneously produces a poetry that undermines the

courtly logic of Petrarchan circulation, establishing a space for female

desire, and resisting Petrarchanism's silencing of women's voices in part

by rejecting writing itself, even in its residual form as a “well penn'd”

text. She affirms that in place of a kind of verse circulated on paper, she

would sing “cantons of contemned love,” thus avoiding the possible

distortions endured by poetry as it is passed through the hands of others.

Viola's song would depend on no pages - neither messengers nor

manuscripts - for its success. Her “text,” orally improvised and thus more

ephemeral than a sonneteer's, would circulate only through “the babbling

gossip of the air” rather than among the tongues of the court.

Furthermore, Viola's poetry, unlike Orsino's, does not rely at all upon

Olivia's physicality, and instead appeals to her “soul,” an interiority that

remains unfragmented in her verse; she would not reduce Olivia to a

written text designed to represent, replace, and circulate her. Rather,

Olivia remains whole, identified, present, and unambiguously the object

of the poet's desire - but no less a desiring subject in her own right. (381)

Ake also clearly draws a gendered connection between Viola’s oral musicality and

Orsino’s written poetry. Where Orsino’s poetry demands that others fit its prescribed roles, searching for someone who can play Beatrice to his Dante, Viola’s hypothetical song is a participatory action that invites the target of its affection to listen and respond. Ake briefly addresses Anthony Taylor’s reading of Viola’s courtship as condemned by Shakespeare, compared to the “babbling” and self-loss of Echo courting Narcissus, but points out that within the text, Olivia displays increasing attraction towards Viola the more Viola deviates from

Orsino’s text into her own improvisations. (382-383)

If Shakespeare intended to condemn Viola’s speech as babbling and matter-less, he does a surprisingly halfhearted job of it, for the play is littered with praise for her. Orsino, even before he has realized Viola-Cesario’s love for him, takes her into his confidence in a matter of days, shares his deepest secrets with her (inviting seeing and reciprocation, rather than the prescribed

roles of his courtship), and supports her love of an unknown “lady” while declaring that no woman could love like a man (2.4.992). Olivia’s awkward cousin notes down Viola-Cesario’s poetic phrases for his own use, multiple characters remark on her gentility and courtesy, and even Olivia’s grumpy steward Malvolio admits that she is “well-favored.” Viola’s improvisatory skill is not limited to her interactions with Olivia, either - she is constantly mirroring and code- switching, always matching her conversational partner: responding to courtesy with courtesy to one, in French to another, in slang to a third, and completing rhyming couplets with a fourth.

Viola, in fact, demonstrates one of the most delightful aspects of the operatic travesti/pants role: these characters are at home in every position, every class, and every gendered space. Reynolds says of Cherubino, Mozart’s archetypal pants role, that he is

“anarchic… He crosses gender and questions sex difference. He crosses class, being both aristocratic and yet at home with servants... He is always appearing in the wrong places, much to the Count's discomfiture; thus he unsettles every social order.” Like Cherubino, Viola is transgressive, constantly in the wrong place, in the wrong clothes, wooing the wrong person - and the play does not condemn her for it. It is through her unintentional anarchy that the events of the story can happen at all.

Michael Clifford remarks that Jacques Derrida, by 1987, found the idea of transgression to be “a tired one,” and argued for a deeper revolution. For transgression to occur, something must exist to be transgressed, and therefore the very concept of transgression contains what it would destroy - “bound to a discursive order which may be radically arbitrary and historically contingent.” (Clifford 224). The ideal is to reconfigure transgression as a positive act, rather than a negative taken against some boundary, and to “liberate” difference “through the invention of an

acategorical thought” (quoting Foucault’s Theatrum Philisophicum, 186). Clifford continues,

“An acategorical thought would be the one which allowed for the play of the event, of the phantasm, of the simulacrum, without their being organized and subsumed under some greater unity. It would think in the gaps: it would give play to differences.” (Clifford 229). In search of this ideal, transgression becomes repetitive, recrossing boundaries until the limit and the transgression are both so near-simultaneous as to be both almost obliterated.

This repetitive, recursive transgressiveness echoes the anarchy of the travesti role: male, female, crossdressing, noble, servant, wanted, despised, visible, invisible, disguised, in the wrong room wooing the wrong person, destabilizing every signifier and crossing every boundary by the fact of their existence. Donna Haraway’s concept of the “split and contradictory self” connects, too - the idea that no person can be represented by a single identifier, whether of gender or class or race or anything else, and that attempting to see/control via single identifiers is an impossible mockery of objectivity. Instead, Haraway posits a framework of individuals as multidimensional, composed of irreducibly many signifiers and aspects, and inextricably networked with many other individuals (Haraway 586). There is no need to break apart the travesti role into the voice, the body, the costume, the definitely-real and definitely-fake, and attempt to flatten them into categories like “lesbian” or “objectifying, [hetero]sexualizing novelty” (pace, Hadlock and

Halberstam). The travesti role exists multidimensionally, impossible to reduce, impossible to categorize.

Viola, though she does not realize it, holds the power to destabilize society, and does so: her existence distracts Orsino into considering another person’s love, draws Olivia out of mourning and into marriage, and poses a threat to Olivia’s less-successful suitors - both Orsino,

who threatens to kill “his page” if Olivia prefers the page to him, and the awkward knight Sir

Andrew who attempts to challenge her to a duel. Viola is transgression and anarchy, and gentleness, and devotion, and wit, and love, and power.

And yet the final scene is what it is - an abrupt pivot out of anarchy and instability and playfulness, and into easily-settled cisheterosexual pairs via a deus ex Sebastian. What would the end of Viola’s arc look like if it did not take this sudden pivot? She exists for most of the play in a liminal space, between genders, between classes, and yet the play does not embrace her full anarchic potential. What would a final scene be for Viola that embraces her transgressive duality, rather than attempting to resolve it?

CHAPTER 3

VIOLA’S MUSIC

At the beginning of the play, Viola exists as female and constructs a male persona; in both her interactions with Olivia and Orsino, she easily inhabits both her masculine and feminine, and seems almost to terrify herself with her adaptive skill. These two moments form the first two pieces of music in my project - a moment of creation, and a moment of conflict.

The first aria in the project (the moment of creation) derives from the opening scene of

L’Incoronazione, in which Amore, the god of love (a castrato role), declares his power over the events of the story that will unfold. His opening lines, originally incredulous that other deities would dare to forget him, are complicated with broken rhythms and rests for Viola and become musical expressions of disorientation and vulnerability. The next section, where Viola conceives of Cesario as a disguise and safety and begins to craft a new identity, is almost identical in rhythm and movement to Amore’s declaration of identity (listen for the playful instrumental trills on “such disguise as shall become”, which originally accompanied Amore’s description of himself as a conquering child), and declares Viola’s own power - “for I can sing, and I’ll speak to him in many kinds of music.” The final section, again almost unchanged from the source, creates a parallel between Amore’s vow to prove himself and Viola’s entrusting her journey to time and her hearers’ silence.

The second aria (the moment of conflict) comes from one of the long, text-heavy monologue arias typical of Monteverdi’s operas, in which Ottavia (a role for low soprano, or mezzo-soprano) laments her husband’s infidelity and alternately curses her gender, her husband, and the gods before quieting into regret and resignation. For Viola-Cesario, the lament, the curse,

the regret, and the resignation are all internally directed, and the monologue which she delivers alone onstage becomes a dialogue. As Cesario, the outward-presenting masculine, she rapidly replays her interaction with Olivia and realizes with shock that Olivia loves her; as Viola, original, female, and present only within her own mind, she curses Cesario, un-naming him

“disguise” and “wickedness” and casting him as a deceptive womanizer. Cesario protests, and both aspects of Viola contemplate the truth of their double existence, and their impact on Olivia.

The ending of the scene is softer than that of either Shakespeare or Monteverdi - not regret or anxiety so much as a mutual quietness and acceptance of each other, and a willingness to wait and see how time will resolve the conflict.

The third aria (the moment of cohesion) pivots further away from Shakespeare’s final scene towards Monteverdi’s. L’Incoronazione ends with a beautiful duet for the chaotic united lovers,

Nerone (castrato) and Poppea (soprano), which in modern practice is often sung by two female voices, one playing male and one playing female. For Viola, I envisioned it as a dreamlike moment of cohesion: a musical space in which the masculine of Cesario and the feminine of

Viola are no longer at odds, struggling to maintain control of a single voice and a single musical line, but beautifully in harmony and dissonance and motion with each other. It is a space in which neither Olivia, nor Orsino, nor Sebastian, nor any other character figures: a final scene for

Viola alone, whole and integrated. Her anarchic role has at last transgressed transgression, no longer in conflict against self, other, and society, but outside of the frameworks that were originally transgressed (Clifford 226). For the first time, too, I have left Monteverdi’s music almost entirely untouched when placing Shakespeare’s text, instead lightly editing and excerpting the text to fit the music. This duet, unlike the previous arias, is not designed for the

long spoken-rhythmic lines of a monologue - Monteverdi had pioneered the seconda practica or stile concitato (agitated style) of music, in which the rules of musical form could be bent to accommodate the expressivity of a text, but the duet was a return to what he called prima practica or stile antico (the old style), in which the primary focus was the melody and the way in which it approached and resolved dissonance. In this moment of cohesion, Viola-Cesario experiences not a single-voiced unison, but dissonance and difference that creates harmony. The split and contradictory self becomes beauty.

CHAPTER 4

VIOLA IN PERFORMANCE

On a very straightforward level, Cesario is performed live and Viola is performed digitally because Cesario is Viola’s outward presentation for the majority of the play, and Viola- as-feminine speaks in asides and allusions and monologues alone until the final reveal. Digital performance also allows for the doubling of one actor as two characters within the same scene, which would be impossible in a traditional stage production. It can be seamless in film, with twins in movies like The Parent Trap or The Social Network, but creating a filmed performance loses a critical aspect: the participatory liveness of theatre.

Live performance is participatory in multiple ways: for the performers, who interact to create the performance, and for the audience, who by existing in the same moment and space as the performance see it created. Like Orsino’s prescribed, Petrarchan poetry, a film is fixed and unresponsive. It has been created - and quite possibly created very well - but it will remain the same every time it is played. A film version of this project, in which I appeared onscreen as both aspects of Viola-Cesario, would exist only in one iteration: never adapting, never changing, never creating a new participatory experience both for the performer and the viewer.

A live performance, on the other hand, can never be exactly the same twice. Even two successive performances of the same production of the same show with the same cast will be different, in unpredictable, uncontrollable ways. Like Viola, the performance changes with the energy of the audience, responding to their responses; like her courtship of Olivia, it is an invitation for the performer to respond and re-create. Twelfth Night and L’Incoronazione di

Poppea, like other plays and operas, have been remounted in many different ways in many

different eras - one script, one score, with infinite re-embodiments. This project becomes a new staging of both works, excerpting from them and reconfiguring them in conversation with intimate art-song short films like The Pleiades Project and The Ives Project, projection-based interactive performance like the Eurovision work of Sergey Lazarev and filmmaker Michael van der Aa’s opera The Sunken Garden, and more traditional stagings of both Twelfth Night and

L’incoronazione that are performed in theatres and opera houses and then digitally streamed and documented, a single iteration of the production frozen in time.

Although, due to COVID-19 distancing measures, my project cannot be performed in a space that encompasses both the performer, and the audience - where the shared closeness of the room becomes a participation in itself, where the vibrations of the voice and the movement of the breath are present in all present bodies - my performance of the piece will be by nature slightly different every time I present it. Ideally, I will have multiple opportunities to perform it - for my committee’s review, for my defense, and so on - and by returning again and again to the music, the text, and my unchanging digital partner, my own experience of the performance will shift and adapt and reveal new aspects of the story, both aspects of the character, the way that my setting of the text sits in the music and the way that both fit in my voice, the way that my movement changes my voice and my interaction, and more. This is not a project that engages Walter

Benjamin’s thoughts on aura, and the real-fake dichotomy of the original and the reproduced work. This piece transgresses the binaries of original and reproduction, recorded and live; it focuses simultaneously on the physical reverberation of a voice and the visual of a doubled on- film-and-onstage body, and the visible artifice of the video which refuses to let the viewer settle

into a definite categorization of recorded film or live theatre. Again, the cohesive whole reveals itself in the overlap of the binaries.

This project thus exists in multiple dimensions, like Viola, like Haraway’s concept of self, like a travesti role, like any individual. It is opera and theatre and film and concert; it is gender, male and female and a dissonant harmony of both; it is performance, filmed live and sung live and streamed live and producing a recording that will not represent it as it was and will later be. It is split and contradictory and transgressive and cohesive. It is pastiche, an afternoon filming, six years of travesti roles, twenty years of Shakespeare; an opera singer on Skype, a video editor piecing together shots and adjusting visuals in Premiere, a researcher seeking the intersection of gender studies and performance studies, an actor barefoot in the park, a musicologist collecting books. Where Viola as a character brings into conversation the operatic traditions of castrati/travesti repertoire and the gender explorations of feminist studies, she posits a forward movement outside of Shakespeare’s moment. “You are now out of your text,” Olivia teases her, perhaps without realizing how true it is - Viola is out of her text, and into a multidimensional potentiality that encompasses music, history, performance practices from the

Renaissance to the modern day, and a playful unlimited experience of gender that is itself a transgressive and multi-voiced performance. The art that results from the commonality between all these, these signifiers and experiences and categories, is the beauty of their coexistence: the cohesive whole that embraces the transgression.

WORKS CITED

Ake, Jami. “Glimpsing a ‘Lesbian’ Poetics in ‘Twelfth Night.’” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 43, no. 2, 2003, pp. 375–394. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4625073.

Barr, Ivey. “‘Much Virtue in If’: Unstable Female Masculinity in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.” 13 May 2019. Digital Culture: Emerging Media Histories (ATCM 6386), The University of Texas at Dallas, student paper.

Clifford, Michael. “Crossing (out) the Boundary: Foucault and Derrida on Transgressing.” Philosophy Today, vol. 31, no. 3, 1987, pp. 223-233, doi: 10.5840/philtoday19873133

Feldman, Martha. The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds. University of California Press, 2016.

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3, Fall 1988, p. 586.

Kling, Kelsey A. “‘Methinks You My Glass’: Shakespeare’s Twins in Text and Performance.” 28 October 2008. Texas State University - San Marcos, student paper.

Reynolds, Margaret. “Ruggiero’s Deceptions, Cherubino’s Distractions.” En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Schneider, Magnus Tessing. “Seeing the Empress Again: On Doubling in ‘L'incoronazione Di Poppea.’” Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 24, no. 3, 2012, pp. 249–291., www.jstor.org/stable/23319591.

Shakespeare, William. “Twelfth Night”. Shakespeare.mit.edu, 1601, shakespeare.mit.edu/twelfth_night/full.html.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Ivey Barr is a performance artist, web developer, and opera singer in Dallas, Texas. As a homeschooled student she was introduced early on both to Shakespeare and to classical music, and began studying opera performance in 2014 while pursuing her BA in Arts and Technology at

The University of Texas at Dallas. In her graduating semester, she performed her first travesti role, Mozart’s Cherubino, and went on to produce four student operas as a graduate student, including her own original pastiche of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing using music from the operas of Mozart. While pursuing her MFA, she expanded her work into videography- enhanced performance, including designing projections for a modern production of La Clemenza di Tito, and into the intersection of Shakespeare, opera, and gender studies.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Ivey Barr

Address: www.iveybarr.com Email: [email protected]

EDUCATION 2017 BA in Arts and Technology The University of Texas at Dallas

2017 Minor in Music The University of Texas at Dallas

HONORS AND AWARDS 2017 Graduate cum laude (GPA 3.73) 2017 Dean’s List 2013-2017 Academic Excellence Scholarship 2013-2017 Collegium V Honors Student 2013 Dean’s List

PROJECTS AND PUBLICATIONS 2019 “Much Virtue in If”: Unstable Female Masculinity in Shakespeare’s As You Like It The University of Texas at Dallas Student paper for Digital Culture: Emerging Media Histories (Dr. Wendy Sung).

2018 Much Ado About Nothing (Mozart pastiche operetta) The University of Texas at Dallas Created, translated, designed, produced, directed, and performed in a pastiche of Mozart’s arias and Shakespeare’s text with student organization Comet Opera.

2017 “Let all that is not love perish”: Gender Binarization and True Identity in La Clemenza di Tito The University of Texas at Dallas Student paper for Approaches to ATEC (Dr. Kim Knight).

2017 Procrastination (animated short) The University of Texas at Dallas Preproduction team member for Animation Studio short film (2017-2018). Created storyboards and concept designs.

2017 Flickering (animatic) The University of Texas at Dallas Created original story and 3-minute animatic for capstone thesis (Supervisors: Prof. Todd Fechter and Prof. Noah Zisman).

2017 Shoes (animatic) The University of Texas at Dallas Combined photography and storyboards for a silent 2-minute short for Photography: New Media (Prof. Marcie Palmer).

SERVICE AND WORK EXPERIENCE 2019-2020 Web Development Intern, Visual App 2018-2020 Marketing Coordinator, Opera in Concert 2019 President, Comet Opera 2018-2019 Marketing Director/Producer/Director/Music Director/ Stage Manager/Translator/Mezzo-Soprano, Comet Opera 2018 Vice President, Comet Opera 2017 Web Development Intern, Visual App 2015-2016 Marketing Coordinator, Hunsicker Senior Living Services

TEACHING EXPERIENCE 2019-2020 Instructor of Record The University of Texas at Dallas Design I (Prof. Roxanne Minnish)

2019 Teaching Assistant The University of Texas at Dallas Reading Media Critically (Dr. Laura Imaoka)

2018 Music Director/Vocal Coach Comet Opera at UT Dallas Music-directed and coached college students in a bilingual English/Italian production of Händel’s “Alcina”.

2018 Teaching Assistant The University of Texas at Dallas Mediated Textuality (Dr. Laura Imaoka)

2018 Music Director/Vocal Coach Comet Opera at UT Dallas Music-directed and coached college students in an English production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte”.

2018 Teaching Assistant The University of Texas at Dallas Preproduction I (Prof. Sean McComber)

2018 Director/Vocal Coach Comet Opera at UT Dallas Directed and coached college students in an original English operetta, “Much Ado About Nothing”.

2017 Teaching Assistant The University of Texas at Dallas Computer Animation Processes (Prof. Phillip Hall).

2013 Dramaturge/Assistant Director Frisco Fine Arts Co-op Condensed and helped direct scenes from Hamlet (Supervisors: Kathryn Ivey- Barr and Rachel Donnelly).

2013 Student Director Frisco H.I.S. Drama Club Directed student production of “Night at the Wax Museum”.

2011 Teaching Assistant/Director Sonflower Co-op Assisted with 3rd-4th-grade Shakespeare class and its end-of-semester performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Supervisor: Rachel Donnelly.)