Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | D | Dance Magazine

Song & dance: choreographers invade opera.

Article Excerpt
Skimpy rehearsal periods, wretched studios, lousy music tapes, dancer injuries. You think choreographers have problems now? Ha! Those traditional vexations pale in comparison to the challenge of confronting the ego of a genuine opera diva. Yet dancemakers are taking the plunge and besieging the world's opera stages. In some of the most prestigious opera houses, they are running the show.

Choreographers have participated, sometimes peripherally and often anonymously, in the production of opera since its beginnings in 16th-century Italy. From the age of Monteverdi, dance has been an integral element in opera. The French even gave dancemakers the opera-ballet, a hybrid genre that enlisted ballerina legends like Salle and Camargo.

When Mark Morris directs a new production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice at the Metropolitan Opera this May, it will herald a milestone. This will be the first time in more than 50 years that a famous dancemaker has directed an opera at the Met (the last was George Balanchine, who staged his friend Igor Stravinsky's Rake's Progress in 1953). Similar projects are happening this season in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, and Berlin. Directing opera is the newest frontier for adventurous choreographers.

Opera companies in the United States have always welcomed them--in limited amounts. Today, when the plot requires a dance, the Met commissions it from the best and the brightest. Doug Varone's ultimately topless "Dance of the Seven Veils" for Strauss' Salome three years ago and Christopher Wheeldon's "Dance of the Hours" for La Gioconda last...