Habits of Realism: Documenting Reality and Rethinking Social Change through Opera
- Apr 14
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 15
Date: 21 April 2026 (Tues)
Time: 5 PM (HKT)
Venue: Room 4.36, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Speaker: Sarah Collins, Conservatorium of Music, The University of Western Australia
All are welcome! No registration required.
This paper investigates how techniques of documenting reality in film, theatre, shadow puppetry, and opera offer new ways of understanding processes of social change. These techniques are specific to their media, but they also reach across media in ways that highlight modern habits of representing and capturing—as well as transforming—ourselves and the world around us. The paper introduces a related notion of ‘habit’, which has a double nature of both repetition and change, or imitation (mirroring) and transformation. It positions opera as exemplifying this double nature through opera’s preoccupation with the impossibility of direct communication, or of capturing things in motion. A collection of cuttings of the early-twentieth-century German silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger and her modernist colleagues serve as a prompt for the conceptual discussion. Using Reiniger’s cuttings as a lens, the paper explores the affordances of habit—especially 'operatic habit'—and realism with respect to our understanding of transformation.
Sarah Collins’ research focuses on the relationship between culture, politics, technology, and broader intellectual and political currents. Her work draws insight from archival sources and contexts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bringing these into contact with contemporary anxieties around human freedom and automation.
Sarah is Professor of Music at the University of Western Australia. She is the 2024 recipient of the Dent Medal, and is currently co-editor of the journal Music & Letters. Sarah has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, Durham University, and L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and has received competitive research funding from a range of sources including the British Academy, the Australian Research Council, and the European Commission.
Habits of Realism: Documenting Reality and Rethinking Social Change through Opera
Society of Fellows in the Humanities
School of English
This exploration of opera as a medium for social change is compelling. It would be fascinating to discuss how varying cultural contexts influence operatic realism and what that means for global dialogue on social issues.
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