Barbara Willis Sweete
Barbara Willis Sweete
Queen of HD Transmissions
This chapter investigates the complexity of Barbara Willis Sweete's creative orchestration of multiple personnel and technical operations in HD transmissions of live opera, with particular emphasis on how the input of composer, stage director, and performers are re-mediated through her technical expertise and cohering cinematic aesthetic. Sweete, one of the two principal directors of the Metropolitan Opera Live in high-definition (HD) live transmissions, has a varied media background. She brings to her HD transmissions a carefully calibrated practice that attends not only to music, staging, and performance but also to visual narrativity and what she calls visual architecture. This chapter explores how that practice engages with the intermedial nature of the live HD broadcast of opera. It argues that Sweete's visual practice places her at the center of this new cultural form—an intermedial hybrid—which can be viewed as currently in its “transitional” period, much as cinema “transitioned” in the 1910s.
Keywords: visual narrativity, Barbara Willis Sweete, HD transmissions, high-definition, cinema, Metropolitan Opera Live, staging, performance, visual architecture, opera
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