Opera about Ballet

[SanderO]

Sandy,

Thanks for the heads up. I am looking forward to see that they do. When I raised the issue in this topic it occurred to me that there is no reason not to have more "movement" in opera, that is more like a Broadway musical, but with more sophisticated singing and dance. Broadway musicals always impressed me as performance art somewhat derivative of opera.

And as far as themes of opera and story ballet, why can't ballet, or the theatre be the theme, subject etc. of an opera? In many ways it's hard to related to some characters and stores in opera (and ballet)... like Aida for example. By the way, Tosca is an opera which has a opera singer as its main character. It's kind of self referential in that way.

I am not expert on opera librettos, but some of them we can relate to a bit more and their stories seem as if they could be or are rooted in reality or drawn from reality, like La Traviata, for example. On the other hand we have some lovely fairy tales like the Magic Flute. So why not an opera whose theme involves ballet? I think it could be visually very exciting. Some times seeing opera singer standing and belting out arias I wonder why all the elaborate sets... the action is so minimal and almost unnecessary.

Anyway... it was just a thought. And as both these performance art forms are living ones as well as "relics" of the past, there's no reason that someone will make my vision real.

[SandyMcKean]

When I raised the issue in this topic it occurred to me that there is no reason not to have more "movement" in opera......

What I think you will like in this production's use of dance is that the ballet-like dance is not done in interlude, but incorporated directly into the action. The chorus is an integration of both singers and dancers just as we speculated on earlier in this thread.

And as far as themes of opera and story ballet, why can't ballet, or the theatre be the theme, subject etc. of an opera?

As I commented in an earlier post, I agree with you. In fact, I'd love to see this done, and I believe the problems of "singer/dancer" and "dancer/singer" could be solved by proper direction -- just as Wadsworth did here in "Iphigenia in Tauris".