Dido and Aeneas revisited

Baroque opera gets multimedia treatment

Purcell’s 1689 opera Dido and Aeneas, with its haunting aria “Dido’s Lament,” is a standard work of the Baroque opera repertoire, but a pair of young companies is teaming up to put a new spin on the familiar work. Opera Erratica, under the direction of Patrick Young, and Classical Music Consort, led by Ashiq Aziz, have previously collaborated on one similar production, Acis and Galatea, at the Fringe of Toronto last year.
Both productions employ multimedia effects to heighten and contemporize the performance. Young points out that “Acis and Galatea is a pastorale. It really isn’t an opera; it’s a masque. It was more difficult to conceive that in a contemporary way.” Therefore, he says, “last year I was more interested in incorporating the Baroque elements in the projections, so I drew on a lot on the paintings of Poussin, projecting them onto mannequin forms and naked torsos. This show is all about shadows, so most of the projections are filmed silhouettes, and there’s a kind of doubling where Dido, Aeneas and Belinda are doubled with the shadow characters.”
This, says Young, allows for an even more heavily layered confluence of media than in a standard operatic performance, which already incorporates text, music, dance and design elements. “I’m very interested in the way that opera has all these elements that are structurally trying to work to the same effect,” he says. “It makes a very unique and bizarre experience, because you have all of these things happening at once.”
Young continues, “Good opera is all these things working together. I like to pick apart the different levels of a production: the scenery, the staging, the music, the intention of actors. I like to illustrate how these are individual elements as well.”
He adds, “I’m also playing fast and loose with the idea of supertitles. They’re supposed to be transparent, but that’s actually false transparency; supertitles affect how you feel about the work. When you go to an opera, you don’t only see it and hear it, but you read it as well.” Thus, in this production, the supertitles will sometimes offer subtextual comments as well as strict replication of the libretto.
“What I like about opera is it’s kind of an impressionistic art in that, unlike naturalistic theatre, opera can affect you on an emotional level,” Young says. “At its best, like dance, it can affect you like a kind of accumulation of sensation. It’s more than the sum of its parts, so that you have things coming at you from different angles. It’s those moments when they coalesce and when they split apart that I’m really fascinated with.”
Young says he believes the younger generation will appreciate this multilayered approach. “Coming to see an opera is always a little challenging,” he says. “People often think that opera has to be long and boring. We’re trying to show them that it can be short and fun.”
Opera Erratica and Classical Music Consort present Purcell’s Dino and Aeneas at the Winchester Street Theatre from Aug. 19 to 29. For tickets, call 416-978-8849 or visit www.uofttix.ca.

Publication Date: 2009-08-16
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