Levin er direktør ved Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, og Addie Clark Harding Professor i Germanic Studies, Cinema & Media Studies og Theater & Performance Studies ved College University of Chicago, og han presenterer seg selv på engelsk:
Levin om Levin
My recent work focuses on the aesthetics and politics of performance in opera, theater, and cinema. In addition to my academic work, I’ve also worked extensively as a dramaturg for various opera houses in Germany and the United States and for William Forsythe's Ballet Frankfurt.
This past year, I collaborated with Saar Magal on Jephta’s Daughter, an experimental performance piece commissioned for the 2015 summer festival of the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich.
My work at IMV will involve an innovative collaboration between the University of Oslo Department of Musicology and the Norwegian National Opera. The seminar will introduce students to the interpretive work that transpires in the course of an opera production.
The students and I will attend a week of rehearsals for a new production being prepared at the Norwegian National Opera – in this case, Alexander Mørk-Eidem’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute – discussing what we see and hear in dialogue with a roster of critical readings in an intensive seminar that will take place at the opera house.
The course is designed as an introduction to what we might term “applied interpretation” since of course the work of opera production involves interpretation in a host of registers – musical, dramatic, historical, scenic.
A center for innovative and compelling productions
Given the Norwegian National Opera’s increasing prominence as a center for innovative and compelling productions, it seems like an especially promising site to explore the conditions and possibilities for innovative interpretation on stage today.
The collaboration came about thanks to the imaginative engagement and creative initiative of a number of colleagues in the Music Department as well as the creative engagement and collaborative inclinations of a number of colleagues in the artistic administration of the Norwegian National Opera including Maria af Klinteberg Herresthal, Hedda Høgåsen-Hallesby and most especially, the Artistic Director Per Boye Hansen.
I might note that while I have for many years, since my university studies, been involved in opera production as well as the academic study of opera, this is the first time I will be bringing these two distinct practices – academic and artistic – into such explicit dialogue. I am very excited to see what transpires!
In my free time I love to go to performances of all kinds – opera, of course, but also theater and contemporary dance in particular; I also love to cook, explore new places by bicycle or on foot, and exercise – after all, I’m an American!