"Ta'mey Dun, Bommey Dun" (Great Deeds, Great Songs): The Klingon Opera U as Ethnodramaturgical Performance
2012; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Games and Media
ResumoEven given the lackluster response to the last iteration of the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-05), the series as a whole and its movie spin-offs have reached far and deep into the cultural mainstream. Everyone, of a certain age and taste, is familiar with green Orion slave girls and the Vulcan nerve pinch of the original series. Even our technology has come to mirror some of its props--witness the iPad's sleek similarity to the computers holding Captain Picard's daily reports. Aside from generating countless cultural memes and inspiring technological gadgetry, the Star Trek franchise is also synonymous with passionate fandom. Star Trek fans saved the original series (1966-69) through a well-organized letter campaign, initiated by Bjo Trimble, and have continued to offer a model for examining fan communities. Beyond fan fiction, cosplay (costumed performance), RPGs (role-playing games), conventions (fan gatherings such as comic cons et al.), and other venues/media for expressing fandom of the Star Trek universe, something unusual and intriguing has surfaced, raising some compelling questions unaddressed by prior Star Trek scholarship. Early scholarship tends to focus on the structure of the narrative, the franchise's grounding myth construction, and/or political readings of the original series. Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence's The American Monomyth (1977) asserts that Star Trek encapsulates an American monomyth wherein a helpless paradise-like society faces evil forces but is rescued by heroic outsiders who appear and then disappear when the threat has been removed. Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women (1991) explores the relationship between fans and the material with which they interact. Star Trek as Myth: Essays on Symbol and Archetype at the Final Frontier (2010) represents the latest addition to the body of scholarship. Various works by Henry Jenkins have added to fan scholarship general, such as his seminal Textual Poachers (1992), and his blog Confessions of an Aca-Fan, he shares his love of things Klingon. Fandom has long centered on the human aspects of the Star Trek universe with ancillary interest the aliens populating it. The Klingons particular have their own fandom. The most recent interest Klingons has tended toward the performative. The Washington Shakespeare Company produced a heavily attended series of Shakespearean scenes Klingon September 2010, and Minneapolis and Chicago, Commedia Beauregard annually mounts a Klingon version of A Christmas Carol. While these two instances are certainly interesting, they remain derivative both the use of translating mainstream Western canonical texts as well as retaining Western staging conventions and design. The production of the Klingon opera U, (1) however, offers something more remarkable for being an original work a (arguably) Klingon style. Produced by the Klingon Terran Research Ensemble, the opera illustrates, through its construction and performance, the ethnographic nature of fan-produced media and its contribution to the fictional culture through the display of ethnographic fragments. I have suggested prior work that, rather than viewing fans as ethnographic subjects, they can be examined performatively as ethnographers, mining ethnographic fragments from the source material order to explore and explain the workings of a fictive culture (Gunnels and Cole). Because of the dramatic nature and dramaturgical assembly of these fragments, the fan is best termed an ethnodramaturg, an active fan who participates creating and concretizing the fictional universe. The activity grants dynamic performative agency to the fan through direct creative participation as well as offering the possibility to practice potential change. The ethnographic deployment of U does two things light of ethnodramaturgy. First, the performative display of this ethnographic object can be read light of a socio-historical continuum wherein Klingons stand in as Other (typically political although more recently racial and cultural) to the American self. …
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