baroque theater and spectacle

I'm not much of a theater or opera fan-- I never gravitated toward it, mostly because of a lack of knowledge on the subject. Also, I find opera intolerable, much like how I can't stand death metal (unlike most of my peers.) It comes down to a question of taste, which I believe is innate and cannot really be grown.

However, I can appreciate (and understand) the aesthetics that make opera, specifically the mechanics of set design in Renaissance and Baroque theatre (see this link on the exhibition at Museum of Jurassic Technology, completed May 2004: http://rachelmayeri.com/blog/2004/10/14/miracles-and-disasters-in-renaissance-and-baroque-theater-mechanics/).

In our first class discussions, we spoke of a society controlled and dominated by spectacle. Spectacle, art and technology all intertwine and transform over the years, and in a way, reflect the anxieties, moods and temperament of our times. In the retrospective I linked, the author speaks of how seventeenth-century Venice was an "apex point" in the history of special effects when it came to scenic and set design. Patrons and visitors of the stage were awed by the realistic and incredibly life-like structures, which changed and transformed before their eyes with each set change.

A quote:

Baroque opera, scholars have argued, reflected the vanities and anxieties of the European court. Texts on opera and court life in Venetian society underscore the power of theater through special effects to convey messages on the dangers and rewards of social performance. However, it seems, that special effects, like art and social expression in general, change with new technology, representing new events, economic forces and information. This poses the question of how special effects in popular entertainment reflect the anxieties of our society today. Yet the exhibition embodies the idea that special effects signify more than ideology: they create a vocabulary for the marvelous.