Reply to Would a trigger warning before showing 1965 Othello film have saved this professor?

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[quote=Anonymous]Reporting I've read says that this undergraduate seminar in music composition was meant to center on Verdi's Othello, as an example of how to build an opera score and libretto from an already existing narrative.

That's certainly a reasonable topic for the seminar to pursue.  But what's not reasonable is the decision to show the Olivier film on the first day.  A seminar that focuses on Othello would begin with the Shakespeare play, and have students read the text.  Then discuss different issues in staging--including the long history of blackface performance.  Maybe bring in a theater historian to talk about 19th century stagings of the play.  And from there, you might go to the Verdi, and maybe onto other musical or operatic reworkings of narratives from other sources.  Or maybe more adaptations and reworkings of Othello.

Really, I can't imagine a reason why anyone would begin a class on this topic with this film.  I wonder whether it was out of some misguided attempt to get the students familiar with the story without having them actually read the play.[/quote]

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