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This article investigates opera performers' ideas on what they can do on stage to music in the service of portraying the characters of an opera production. The performers both describe and depict their ideas, that is, tell and show them, in proposals. Using multimodal interaction analysis, the article examines how the relative deployment of depictions and descriptions in performer proposals change over time. During joint decision-making micro-histories, the proposals become increasingly depictive, as displayed access, alignment, and agreement with the ideas increase. If ideas originate in previous instructions and decisions, however, proposals are immediately constructed with depictions, and if ideas are resisted, they are never fully depicted. The article thus reveals the dialogical and interactional development of ideas on their way to materialize as artwork. The data consist of 20 hours of video recorded opera rehearsals in Swedish, English, and some Italian, which is the language of the libretto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Repetition has often been argued to be a semiotic device that iconically signifies 'more content', such as intensity and plurality. However, through multimodal interaction analysis of materials in English, Estonian, and Swedish, this paper demonstrates how self-repetition is used to coordinate actions across participants and temporally organize the ongoing activity. The data are taken from infant mealtimes, pilates classes, dance training, boardgames, rock climbing, and opera rehearsals. Repetition of both lexical and non-lexical tokens can prolong, postpone, and generally organize segments of action as well as co-create rhythms and moves in a moment-by-moment reflexive relationship with other (non-vocalizing) participants. A crucial feature of repetitions is that they can be flexibly extended to fit the other's public performance, its launching, continuation, and projectable completion. We argue that the iconicity of repetition emerges through its indexical relationship to other bodies, as a real-time jointly achieved phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on how opera rehearsal participants use depictions to accomplish proposals; they use a locally created scene, comprised of concrete embodiments to represent another physically or temporally distant scene. Whereas earlier work investigating depictions in interaction has mainly focused on demonstrations in pedagogical scenarios, this paper will discuss how depictions serve the ongoing creation, and aesthetic negotiation, of a yet-to-be-artistic product. In simultaneously creating and referencing iterations of this artwork, participants' depictions are both self-referential, in introversive semiosis, as well as externally referencing prototypes of mundane behaviour, in extroversive semiosis. We argue that the negotiations of the extroversive and introversive references through depiction constitute the artistic labour of creating a performance. Furthermore, we suggest that the iterative nature of rehearsing an artistic piece demonstrates analogies between introversive semiosis and interactional techniques for projection and depiction. Opera is accomplished through dynamic collaborative social processes, techniques for which include the depictions described in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]