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Jason's avatar

I’m reading Returning to Reims right now, and Eribon is really good at articulating the politics of class and poverty. He described how the French working class turned far right when the left politicians purposely dissolved ways for their electorate to define themselves positively. He also says that a part of this process involved becoming the technocrat “we’re all in this together” left, at the expense of an antagonistic, class conscious identity. The technocrat left won’t stop trying to “bossify”. We’ve lost the ability to even define our goals in non-corporate terms. You’re a boss, I’m a boss. We’re all a boss and our ideological enemies are always conveniently placed to hinder the left becoming the force for positive identity that it used to be.

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Michael Rushton's avatar

I twinge when I see a production that is being advertised as a reinvention, but I see your point that operas and plays from centuries ago *could* be re-set in interesting ways with careful thinking about the time and place the work was composed, the story it tells, and the potential for a setting in a different time and place that could enhance our consideration of it, rather than distract from it (as the majority of such productions do now). But too often the artistic director thinks that taking something "ripped from the headlines" will make do - contemporary references that the intended audience will very easily get, even if it doesn't make any sense. Such as doing Julius Caesar with a Trump lookalike. Or this: https://apnews.com/article/mozart-opera-ai-yuval-sharon-detroit-860d6f5e2408fca7600c4f52620e21da

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