Backstage Live

Different origins have been proposed for the term “obscene”, such as “ill-omened” or “foul” (ob “in front of” + caenum “filth”). According to the Italian actor and director Carmelo Bene, however, “obscene” means “offstage”, or that which should be kept out of the public view, i.e., outside the scene. The etymological connection between “obscene” and “offstage”, affirmed by several scholars and philosophers, is probably fallacious. Nevertheless, a critical use of this notion can illuminate paradigms in the politics of visibility and the limits of representation in Western theatre.
Opera is an excellent case study. Digital technologies and streaming media have changed not only the way we listen to operas, but have also impacted on our aesthetic and moral conceptions, blurring the divide between scene, screen and backstage. Both materially and symbolically, what happens “outside the scene” — including scene changes, the daily life of celebrities and divas and the technical roles working behind the scenes (from the prompter to the make-up artist) — is taking centre-stage through videos, live recordings and HD simulcasts and is proving to be an indispensable byplay of the marketing of opera (The Met: Live in HD is a textbook example). Backstage videos and interviews posted on the social media accounts of opera houses and performers are also increasingly popular and create new practices of moral censorship — as shown by the history of live broadcasts from the backstage at the Opening Night of La Scala.
Linking sociological considerations with different approaches from theatre studies and social media studies, I situate the relation between listening, new media and the obscene in a broader perspective, both spatially and historically, by drawing on my postdoctoral research on operatic audience in the digital age. The obscene, and its spurious etymology, allows us to consider the enhancement of the backstage in the visual age as a form of meta-theatre and to reassess the importance of the machinery, morality, economy, and intrinsic technological mediation of opera. As Luigi Pirandello has shown in his play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the obscene is not only a sort of voyeurism, but also an occasion to reflect on the philosophy of theatre.