Out-of-body performativity in Tod Makhover’s opera “Death and Power”

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of new technologies in the modern opera house, which are implemented in the work of the composer Tod Makhover in a joint project with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — the opera “Death and Power”. It is this stage work, which has received the status of a largescale robotic show, that becomes the object of research in this article. The phrase “out-of-body performativity” declared in the title of the article is the transfer of the physical entities of the actors through the effect of “absence of presence”, that is, creating the feeling of the presence of the actor on the stage, while he is not there. The article is based on an interdisciplinary method of analysis, which is dictated by the complexity of the object of research itself. The conclusion can be the provision that the effects presented in the opera are not part of the purely design or director’s side of the performance, they exist together with music and text, forming a powerful organically unified mechanism.