Cecilia holds degrees in Music (BA) and History of Art (MSt) from the University of Oxford. In March 2016 she was shortlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Responses to Modernism for her staging of Kandinsky’s The Yellow Sound. In 2016/17 Cecilia staged an unperformed Ballets Russes project, Liturgie, and a Dadaist opera, Collision, with Spectra Ensemble as part of her research. In 2022, she earned her PhD in History of Art from University College London supervised by Professor Frederic J. Schwartz.

Research Interests
Critical Theory; Music and Visual Culture; Wagner and the 20th-century reception of Gesamtkunstwerk; Media Theory; Performance Studies; Practice as Research; Opera Studies.

Thesis ‘Opera as Multimedia: The Experiments of Wassily Kandinsky, Natalia Goncharova and Kurt Schwitters, 1908-1924’
Funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership

Thesis abstract
My thesis explores the prominent role of visual media in nineteenth and twentieth-century opera through developments in media technology and changing notions of perception. In particular, it investigates the operatic experiments of the visual avant-garde: Kandinsky’s Der gelbe Klang (1909), the Ballets Russes’ Liturgie (1915) and Schwitters’ Merzbühne (1919) and Normalbühne Merz (1924). These works tend to be considered in relation to Richard Wagner and his Gesamtkunstwerk, to whom the artists themselves alluded. I seek, however, to relativise Wagner’s legacy by positioning these unperformed works in an expanded field of technical and mass media, and through their recreation in performance. Chapter 1 demonstrates how the Paris Opéra of the 1820s catered to a new kind of observer and mobilised mise-en-scène to suit novel conditions of perception and attention driven by a burgeoning mass entertainment sector. I argue that the institution prepared the ground for the artistic avant-garde who, in a competitive twentieth-century mass mediascape, released opera from a narrative-bound dramaturgy. In this vein, Kandinsky’s Der gelbe Klang used lighting technology to stimulate in the listening observer a specifically artistic kind of experience which I situate in the discourses of Neo-Kantianism and Einfühlung. Chapter 2 considers the artistic and commercial pressure placed on opera by the new medium of film as exemplified by the Ballets Russes who, in their unrealised ballet-opera Liturgie, borrowed filmic techniques in the spirit of tribute and rivalry, or remediation. Chapter 3 considers the parallels between Schwitters’ Merz stage works and the radical staging practices at Berlin’s Kroll Opera House (1927-1931). I explore their strategy of montaging a historically consistent operatic score and libretto with a contemporary staging in the light of Ernst Bloch’s theory of Ungleichzeitigkeit (non-contemporaneity), a constellation which demonstrates the demands made of the perceptual faculties of the observer across media and institutions.

Performances
Collision, a “comic opera in banalities” by Kurt Schwitters and Lewis Coenen-Rowe at Grimeborn Opera Festival, The Arcola Theatre, London, 17, 18 & 19 August 2017 and The Greenwood Theatre, London, 24 & 25 May 2017

Liturgie, a ballet-opera by Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes, reinvented by Chappell, Jetzer, McGarrigle, Muir and Stinton at Tête à Tête Opera Festival, The Place, London, 25 July 2017 and By Other Means Gallery, London, 15, 16 & 17 December 2016
https://vimeo.com/228654182

The Yellow Sound, a colour opera by Wassily Kandinsky and Thomas de Hartmann/GuntherSchuller at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda's College, Oxford, May 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOMHT-8v_Vo&t=13s

Events organised
‘Collage and Crisis? An interdisciplinary symposium on fragmentation and the European twentieth-century avant-garde’, Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London, 26 May 2017

Papers and conferences
‘Opera in the age of film: the Ballets Russes in 1915’ at Opera and the City: Technologies of Displacement and Dissemination, National Theatre of São Carlos, Lisbon, Portugal 24-25 June 2019.

‘Dance on top: The hierarchy of media in the Ballets Russes’ Liturgie’, Movement Matters: Dance, Kinaesthesia and the Avant-Garde, Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London, 1 December 2018.

Roundtable on staging ‘Isolde’, Wagner 1900, University of Oxford, 11 April 2018.

‘Collaborating with the Future: The Ballets Russes' Unperformed Liturgie’ at the International Diaghilev Conference, St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music, Russia 30 November 2017.

‘Painting with Light: Staging The Yellow Sound with Spectra Ensemble (2015)’ at the International Kandinsky and Theatre Conference, Moscow Art Theatre, Russia, 26 November 2017.

‘Performing Colour and Staging Sound: Revisiting Kandinsky's Multimedia Project’ translated and delivered by Professor Boris Sokolov at 'Wassily Kandinsky: Synthesis of Arts, Synthesis of Cultures, International Conference', Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Pushkin Museum, Russia, 15 December 2016.

Teaching
Lecturer, ‘Re-Making’ and ‘Collaboration’, Methodologies of Making BA Module, Spring Term, 2017-2018 and Autumn Term, 2018-2019
Teaching Assistant, Methodologies of Making BA Module, Spring Term, 2017-2018 and Autumn Term, 2018-2019