Interface opéra technologie: sur les politiques de la différence dans les dramaturgies de la convergence

In this article I discuss the creative use, within opera and multimedia dramaturgies, of devices and methodologies inspired by mechanisms and behaviours inherent to new technologies, particularly the hypertext, the database and the list. As subject of analysis, I will focus on the works resulting from the collaboration between Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway, produced in the 1990's: 'M is for Man, Music, Mozart', 'Rosa, the Death of a Composer' and 'Writing to Vermeer'. Deconstructive phenomena occurring within this paradigm are clearly influenced by post-dramatic filmic and theatrical mechanics (Lehmann, 2006) as by the epistemology of convergence culture (Jenckins 2006), sanctioned by the collision and cohabitation of new and old media and technologies. The creative paths are structured - with the recurrence to heterogeneous, fragmented, occasionally borrowed or revisited materials - on large semiotic networks which mirror the radical patterns of the contemporary polyvocality, repeating and transforming themselves, and questioning the genre's ontology. Implementing principles of stylistic pluralism, in a convergence model, these works reveal a common motivation of exploration and transgression of the limits of representation, observable on the several sound and visual plans (in a complex performative text) and sharing a critical argumentation marked by the skills of the media devices in presence. This question arises not only as a response to the need for new mechanisms that allow a creative management, non-narrative, of segments of information, but also to the urge to bring together, critically, different genres and artistic practices, old and new textualities. © 2013 HMD/Croatian Musicological Society Printed in Croatia.