197Christine Sun Kim’s Face Opera II : Opera Beyond the Borders of Sound

Opera as an art form brings together several elements: music, singing, acting, movement, set and costume design each contribute to create a performance.Among these elements, however, music plays a predominant role.In Western cul tural contexts, music is considered to be audible sound, and so opera can be seen as a product of Western musical culture values.In this cultural landscape, Deaf art ist Christine Sun Kim proposes her work Face Opera II.Although the work is pre sented as opera, with reference to the context of melodrama, it breaks the confines and definitions of audible sound, which are overcome and replaced by elements of American Sign Language, such as facial expression.These features then recall the strong expressiveness of the face i n theatrical contexts, and broaden the definition of music as audible sound, as well as renewing the concept of melodrama.Audible sound is still found in Face Opera II, but in a context, culture and experience of Deaf people, with a non-pitched sound.Opera, with Kim, overcomes the need for the pitched sound and takes the political value of an artistic form belonging to a major ity culture, such as the hearing culture, which is reborn within a minority cultural context such as that of the Deaf culture.