A Rendezvous of Theatre with Music on the Metamodernist Stage: The Genotype of Sun and Sea by Rugilė Bardžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė

Abstract

The article investigates and substantiates, with scholarly arguments, the identity of the genotype of the artifact Sun and Sea (2017) by Rugilė Barzdziukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė. The author’s concept of the music genre (music genotype 1990, 2021) is used as a theoretical base and a research method. The conception of a ‘musical genotype’, or a dynamic music genre, proposed by the author of the article, is based on the idea of a ‘spiritual organism’. Meanwhile, the concept signifies not only the fact of an inherited type of opus (in a sense, a kind of DNA, genome of an opus) but also the fact of its self-organisation and live change (transformation). The genotype is a mark of identity of the products created by individual artistic intelligence, a recursive self-organising system that pervades the development of music art with its changing actualisation. The proposed theoretical model of the music genotype forms a new approach to the identity of the phenomenon, its origin and development, structural elements, and ontology and promotes the development of the discourse of dynamic processes. From this point of view, the music scene of contemporaneity and its sound art represent the ‘chromatic’ phase of the change in genotype (macro)systems. The author proposes that the structural elements of the genotype are naturally grouped under determinants of different origins. The tetractys structure of the music genotype is formed by: (a) factors of sociocultural determination; (b) factors of communicative determination, and (c) factors of artistic determination, covering the aspects of the genre poetics (ideas), and the formal structure, introduction of poetics through the sounds of music. From this point of view, the  article investigates the factors representing the music genotype of Sun and Sea, however, particular attention is paid to the analysis of the artistic determinants of the music genotype. Sun and Sea” is tested as an opus-hybrid, the genotype structure of which is dominated by the opera segment and the performance component interacts in a subordinate manner. The transformations and atypicality of traditional genres and the mixed forms of genres (poly-genres, hybrid genres, music in-between genres, Musik zwischen den Genres, etc.) have become historical facts in the second half of the twentieth through the twenty-first century. In the course of the research, the artifact Sun and Sea is contextualised in the environment of the cultural paradigm of metamodernism, Regieoper theatre, and the mainstream transformation of music genotypes.