The Interactional Histories of Performance Bodies : From Describing to Depicting Proposed Ideas at Opera Rehearsals

This article investigates opera performers’ ideas on what they can do on stage to music in the service of portraying the characters of an opera production. The performers both describe and depict their ideas, that is, tell and show them, in proposals. Using multimodal interaction analysis, the article examines how the relative deployment of depictions and descriptions in performer proposals change over time. During joint decision-making micro-histories, the proposals become increasingly depictive, as displayed access, alignment, and agreement with the ideas increase. If ideas originate in previous instructions and decisions, however, proposals are immediately constructed with depictions, and if ideas are resisted, they are never fully depicted. The article thus reveals the dialogical and interactional development of ideas on their way to materialize as artwork. The data consist of 20 hours of video recorded opera rehearsals in Swedish, English, and some Italian, which is the language of the libretto.