The Notes Session, Episode 1: No Better Way

NB: frank discussion of onstage nudity.

When is nudity onstage the only way to tell the story?

Jacquelyn Stucker and Theo Hoffman have both done it: Jackie in a love scene in L'incoronazione di Poppea at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, and Theo in a mad scene in Iphigénie en Tauride at the Opéra-Comique. We both thought it was the right call. In our first Consensus Punditry episode, we try to work out what made it right, and why the answer turned out to be the same both times.

In this episode:

• Two reviews, two productions: what critics see, and what they can't
• The four conditions: necessity, authorship, consensus and conviction, and why nudity reads as story rather than shock only when all four are true at once
• What the audience sees: why the fourth condition is the only one visible from the house, and what "gratuitous" usually means
• From the inside: how each of us got there, with a caveat up front: we both had good experiences, and we know that isn't universal

Next up, 22 October: Field Notes, our reaction to Tobias Kratzer's Die Walküre at the Bayerische Staatsoper.

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