"There was more marrying of acoustic and electronic on Saturday night. What sounded like a plague of cicadas turned out to be the start of Philippe Manoury's "En echo." Black-frocked soprano Juliana Snapper was the sole presence on stage while Miller Puchette presided over the electronics. The echo of the title is that of the eponymous nymph who was robbed of speech save for the curse of repeating all that she heard. Here it is the electronic score that responds to the solo vocal line, but it is a response of infinite subtlety. The effect is haunting, other-worldly, with a sense of barely controlled hysteria in the face of utter loneliness.
'Los Angeles-based Snapper, known for her off-the-wall work, sang the challenging part with superb control."
---- - Keith Clarke, Musical America 6/9/08
"Juliana Snapper is a trained opera singer who uses her voice to ululate at the edge of music, creating visually stunning, highly theatrical performance pieces, combining the sex appeal of 50's burlesque with futuristic imprisonment scenarios. I recently had the pleasure of seeing one of her performances, Watermouth Coda, at PS1, as a part of Ridykeulous: The Odds Are Against Us:, an "over-animated panel discussion with special performances that subverts, sabotages and overturns the language commonly used to define feminism and lesbian art." This panel was in conjunction with the current exhibition at PS1 that runs from February 14 through May 12 WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution.
'Snapper's performance involved her total submersion in a black tank filled with water. Outside on a chilly day on the steps of PS1, she was visible through a large window in the tank that framed her like a picture, as she floated ethereally in a kind of anti-space, dressed in fishnets, furs, a blonde wig and bright red lipstick. Snapper sang underwater for almost an hour, gurgling and shrieking in dissheveled but glamorous distress, into a microphone suspended in the water. She managed to fuse intense discpline, self-inflicted trauma and the desire to communicate through the even the most compromised means, evoking a palpable power and rawness."
---- - Jennifer Coates, "Juliana Snapper's Vocal Hysteria," art:21 4/9/08
"Snapper moves through the crowd, regally forcing her body along to part the waves of star-
struck performance art groupies, up to the altar
where I am standing.
Her voice pierces with the clarity of a trained
opera singer, yet she deliberately forces it beyond
its limits. It keens and scrapes against my tendernesses at every opening of my body.
Snapper calls forth and pushes to excess what
Catherine Clément's observes of the female opera
singer:
You cry, you laugh, you trill, you call out so
far your voice cannot help but fail you [...].
You are faced with the spectacle awaiting,
in that black hole full of eyes shining with
joy. Just like in the circus, you will have to
leap without a net and destroy yourself.
(Clément 1989:11)
Snapper sings the voice as limit. The voice as that
which escapes the body to enunciate the self is
rendered unbearably raw, a flayed shred of human
need, desire, pain.
Every pore of my skin opens, a venus flytrap
lusting for light and noise. Sucking at the spectacle as if to drain it of its opulence and leave it, flaccid and tired, at my feet.
But I am, in the instance, powerless after all.
Only a receiver. Absorbing."
---- - Amelia Jones, "Holy Bodies: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper's The Judas Cradle." The Drama Review, Vol. 49, Issue 3. Fall, 2005.
"...the performances are first rate-as good as anything at the New York City Opera or the Met. Of course, Matthew Chellis as the Devil and Juliana Snapper as the Poet stand out..."
---- - Gyda Arber, "Hell." NY Theatre Review. 4/2/06
"Ms. Snapper's voice, while precise and sharp, was still too warmly human, too glaring a reminder of the digital divide between live music and a machine."
---- - Crayton Harrison, The Dallas Morning News, 1/26/06
"Someone says 'she has such a fantastic voice' and the reply is 'yes, even when she's hanging upside down' as Ms Snapper crab walks off of the edge of the stage, screaming at us. The inbuilt contradiction of the globalised, bump 'n' grind libidinal economy goes into freefall, and eventually the performers burst into laughter."
---- - Review: "Sounds Of Excess, Demon Lap Dancing Club." Music For Torching, 5/30/05
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mojca Kumerdej, "Soprano Juliana Snapper's Underwater Sirensong," Delo, June 28, 2008
Leija Svabic, "When Swimming Pool Turns Opera Stage," Triera, June 21, 2008
Jennifer Coates, "Juliana Snapper's Vocal Hysteria," blogArt:21 April 9, 2008
Leah Gangitano, in Performa: New Visual Art Performance,. NY: Distributed Art Publishers, 2007
Lisa Cazzato-Vieyra, "The Judas Cradle Documentary." (DVD) Native Voice Films,
London, UK, 2006.
cIndy Center, "Podcast Interview 21: Juliana Snapper" http://www.cindycenter.com
Faye Hirsch, Review of Performa05. Art in America, February 2006.
Amelia Jones, "Holy Bodies: Erotic Ethics in Ron Athey and Juliana Snapper's The Judas Cradle." The Drama Review, Vol. 49, Issue 3. Fall, 2005.
Nigel Brookes. "Prison, Perception, and the Humanity of Art" Concrete Magazine, July 2005.
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