Abstract

Santa Fe is an operatic lecture in one act that destabilizes the boundary between scholarly research and subjective experience by combining an analysis of Santa Fe with a reflection upon the year I lived there. A city that combines indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican influences, Santa Fe occupies a unique place in the national imaginary of the US. As a stand-in for the Western frontier more generally, Santa Fe could be understood in relation to “Manifest Destiny,” or the idea that the expansion of the US from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans was both justified and inevitable. Indeed, the ostensibly sparsely populated West offered the possibility of “wild land” to be tamed. Towns like Santa Fe seemed to present a welcome escape from the crowded East Coast, places where homesteaders could actualize the upward social mobility and “bootstraps” mentality of the “American Dream.” We find proof of these cultural associations in the tradition of US musical theatre. In both Newsies and Rent, characters in New York City sing about Santa Fe as providing a panacea for all their city-life woes. In Santa Fe, the lecturer will himself perform these songs to a piano accompaniment, interweaving them as but another species of argumentative evidence. These interludes reference my own experiences as a singer and actor, some of which occurred while I was living in Santa Fe, as well as calling attention to the format of the lecture as itself a kind of performance. Through its circulation as a common format, the lecture brings along with it a set of assumptions. The great benefit of this format is how it can be used to establish and undermine expectations, which is deeply related to my interest in “performance thresholds,” or the moment we recognize or accept a performance as a performance.