Towards a Sensual Operatic Ekphrasis in George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s "Written on Skin"

Abstract

There is little in Katie Mitchell’s production of George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s 2012 opera Written on Skin (WoS) that goes unseen: not only does the thirteenth-century Troubadour plot feature an on-stage orgasm, but throat-slitting, evisceration, cannibalism, and suicide. Nevertheless, when these lurid events are painted by ‘the Boy’ (the heroine, Agnès’s, illicit lover), the audience can never see them. Instead, performing what Crimp and Benjamin term ‘Miniatures’, he takes out a page and, singing, describes the illumination that he has painted onto it. In so doing, he turns his pictures into uttered acts of ekphrasis, the rhetorical device through which visual art is described in detail. 

In asking how operatic ekphrasis can function and unpacking its potency in Written on Skin, I will not only lift ekphrasis from its specificity to the written word and into the performative realm of the sung act, but also refer outwards from Written on Skin’s source texts to locate its viscera within thirteenth-century understandings of the body. I will dissect the opera into four sensory organs—eyes, ears, skin, and mouths—asking what it means to watch and listen to a singer as she caresses velum, or eats a human heart. This body-centred reading of operatic ekphrasis will foreground the viscera of bringing a troubadour razo to the operatic stage, approaching Written on Skin as a reanimation of the bodies of the past.

This was my final-year undergraduate dissertation. It is too large for this blog, but you can find a .pdf file here.