Opera-film Baņuta: The Birth of a New Aesthetic Regime

The opera-film Baņuta (2021) is a contemporary art project based on the Latvian national opera Baņuta (1920, music by Alfrēds Kalniņš, libretto by Artūrs Krūmiņš) that has not been staged since 1999. The film was made under the restrictions of Covid-19 that impeded the production of an interactive contemporary music theatre performance in presence. The project was implemented by an international team led by Latvian dramaturg Evarts Melnalksnis and German stage director Franziska Kronfoth. In terms of approach to the source (score and libretto), content- and form-wise, the opera-film Baņuta is somewhat transgressive and offers a new aesthetic regime to a well-known example of so-called national classics. Using deconstruction strategies, the authors of the film replace representation with performativity, include the discourse of opera’s performing history and contexts in the film narrative, and thus extend the relevance of the following topics: women in war, violence, otherness, and similarity. They introduce the contemporaneity in a performative artistic language and aesthetics, at the same time questioning the relevance of the opera genre in the context of the performing arts today. The article attempts to illustrate the challenges of the researchers facing the interart phenomena based on a particular case.