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DMMO's Guild: Upcoming Events
This year's Guild Holiday Party will be hosted by the Ames Chapter and will feature a performance by Kimberly Roberts of Simpson College's Vocal Music Department and a reading by Jane Cox of the Iowa State University English Department.
All Guild members are encouraged to attend and share the Holiday spirit! If you've been thinking about joining the Guild, this is a great time to meet other members and have a wonderful time!
Limited parking is available in the church lot immediately south of the building. Overflow parking is available in the First National Bank parking lot to the east of the church.
Please RSVP to Dennis Hendrickson at dhendrickson@dmmo.org or (515) 961-6221. Also let Dennis know if you are interested in carpooling to Ames!
Date: Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Time: 7:00 pm
Location: St. John's Episcopal Church (2338 Lincoln Way in Ames). Click here for directions.
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"The Met Live in HD" Broadcasts
The Metropolitan Opera's "Live in HD" series begins later this month and Iowa Public Radio is going to be the local media sponsor for the 2009/2010 broadcasts at movie theaters around the state. DMMO will once again partner with IPR to host the Central Iowa broadcasts at Movies 12 in Ames and Century Theater at Jordan Creek Town Center in West Des Moines.
This month's broadcasts:
Les Contes d'Hoffmann - Offenbach
Saturday, December 19, 2009 (12:00 pm CT)
Running time: 4 hours, 2 minutes (2 intermissions).
Tony Award winner Bartlett Sher (South Pacific) directs this new production, returning after the triumph of his Met Barber of Seville (seen live in HD in the 2006-07 season). Offenbach's fictionalized take on the life and loves of the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann is a fascinating psychological journey. Met Music Director James Levine conducts Joseph Calleja in the tour-de-force title role. Anna Netrebko is the tragic Antonia and Alan Held sings the demonic four villains.
Conductor: James Levine; Production: Bartlett Sher; Kathleen Kim, Anna Netrebko, Ekaterina Gubanova, Kate Lindsey, Joseph Calleja, Alan Held
Discounted vouchers for live performances for Cedar Falls, Dubuque, Ames, West Des Moines and Iowa City sold out. Vouchers for encore performances sold out for Iowa City. You can still purchase regular priced tickets at the local theater.
Visit Iowa Public Radio's website to learn more about purchasing discounted ticket vouchers.
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Opera 101: Designs and Decisions
by Michael Egel, Director of Artistic Operations
Opera 101 is a series of articles designed to give you insight and information about how the operas you see on DMMO's stage are created. We'll follow the planning stages from casting the singers right through to opening night! Let us know if you have questions for future articles by emailing mmcmanus@dmmo.org.
December will get under way with the first official "design meeting" of the season. Since July, Dr. Larsen and I have had preliminary conversations with the various designers and technical staff, but this two-day meeting will be the first chance for the Scenic Designer, Lighting Designer, Costume Designer, and Production Manager to meet together with Dr. Larsen and me.
What happens at a design meeting?
This first design meeting is the one that lays the foundations for the productions. The settings, time periods and locales (as well as any adjustments or updating) are all decided upon. It gives the designers an opportunity to hear from Dr. Larsen, in his capacity as Stage Director, about the basic vision for the look and feel of the production. One of the primary goals of this meeting will be to discuss Susannah, which will be a completely original production, meaning that we will create every aspect from sets to costumes to lighting to props. The designers will have a creative brainstorming session in which ideas are shared and a mutual aesthetic is decided upon. When creating an original production, the discussions range from very esoteric discussions about the feel, mood or color of a scene down to the very mundane decisions about which side of the stage a doorway needs to be on or the color of a dress. For the production of Macbeth, we will discuss the alterations needed to convert one of DMMO's existing sets into a Scottish castle, a witch's cavern and a desolate battlefield. There will also be extensive conversations about the rental set for The Marriage of Figaro and the challenges inherent in fitting a set created for another theater into the Blank Performing Arts Center.
What considerations must the designers take into account when working with DMMO?
DMMO is fortunate among regional opera companies of our size to have a long history of originally designed scenery tailored to our unique stage and our production style. Most of our peer companies rely soley on rental sets which often do not fit on our stage due to its unusual dimensions. Recent seasons at DMMO have featured two original sets and one rental set, allowing us to exercise our creativity without breaking the bank. We'll use that formula again this summer.
For costumes, DMMO works primarily with Malabar, LTD, which is a large costume company based in Toronto. Malabar has a full set of costumes for most operas in the standard repertory as well as many of the American/20th Century operas that we often program. One of the advantages to using a company like Malabar is the variety of sizes that they can accommodate within a given cast. Not only do they have the hundreds of costume pieces that each opera requires, including hats, coats, dresses, pants and more for chorus members and supernumeraries, they also have complete costumes for principal artists of any size. A costume package for the opera Susannah is hard to come by and so we've decided that it will be the most cost effective to design and create our own package. It is very rare for it to be more cost effective to create rather than to rent costumes, so having a costume designer on board to create costumes for this show is a special treat that DMMO hasn't had in almost a decade. Together with brand new scenery and lighting, these original costumes will make Susannah an exciting production!
What happens next?
After this meeting, each of the designers will create sketches and drawings based on the discussions and decisions that came out of the meeting. For example, the scenic designer will render color drawings of each act and scene of the opera. These drawings will be reviewed and discussed in early January. Once a final design is reached, "blueprints" of the set will be drawn up and sent to various scenic shops around the country to gather bids for the cost of construction. Once all of the bids are in, the winning shop will receive the build order and the set will be constructed and painted to our specifications throughout the spring. We will get our first look at the product when it arrives at our theatre in early June! Likewise, the costume designer will prepare sketches for each character's costumes, which will be reviewed and approved before their construction begins.
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Getting To Know You: Barry Steele
Barry Steele has been DMMO's resident lighting designer for six seasons, creating lighting effects, as well as last year's outstanding special video and sound effects for Der Freischütz. He has supervised tours of opera and dance domestically and internationally. As a lighting designer for opera, he has worked for companies including San Francisco Opera Center, Sonoma City Opera, Portland Opera, Nashville Opera, Sarasota Opera, and Opera Delaware.
Tell us about yourself.
I'm a freelance lighting and video designer living in NYC. I've been lighting professionally since my first paid job in 1987, a performance I was dancing in as well. It was some crazy modern dance and they put me in a straight jacket! The lighting kinda looked that way, too. I do come from a dance background, but am very happy to have been working in opera for the last 14 years, and for the last six years with DMMO.
How did you get into Lighting Design?
[pun alert] I had a bright, shiny moment of realization in High School when I saw another student on a ladder focusing a light down onto the stage. I could see the way the light caught the dense air, defined the space on stage, and carved a visual experience out of all the darkness that surrounded it. In that instant all of its power and beauty was clear to me. I knew I had to work with this wonderful, ephemeral medium. I also knew it would be a practice that would occupy a lifetime.
What does the Lighting Designer do?
At its most simplistic, the task of the Lighting Designer is to get light onstage so that all the contributions of the performers, director, and other collaborators can be seen. The real work comes in deciding how something should be seen. That question can be answered literally, or figuratively, or metaphorically, or all of those at once. I study the material to come up with possibilities to support each moment of the performance with an environment that helps inspire something in the audience. That something is determined by the director and supported by the others in the design team and differs from production to production. Even if I do 70 productions of Carmen in my career that something will always be different. That's what makes my work so engrossing.
You've worked on off-Broadway and many other theater productions, as well as opera productions all over the country. What are some of the differences you've encountered? Does the medium of opera present special challenges?
I've been fortunate enough to design and mount productions from San Francisco to Ulaanbaatar (Mongolia). Each production and process has it's own challenges and rewards, and often there's a direct correlation. That's why I love what I do so much. There's no such thing as a 'normal day at the office!' But opera is special to me because of the music. Working with music is a visceral experience for me that I feel bereft of when I go back to 'straight' plays.
You really outdid yourself with the lighting and video design for last summer's Der Freischütz! How did you approach that project and it's unique challenges?
Like all the operas I do, I just start with the music. When you believe in the music it has this wonderful ability to guide you in the right direction. Der Freischütz inspired me and sent me in a new direction that I couldn't have predicted. Dr. Larsen and I spent a lot of time analyzing the story and the music to tease out the underlying thread of truth that would help make the stage alive with the struggle of good and evil. Then began the challenging work of manifesting all of that within the context of a summer repertory of three operas. It's an understatement to say that the crew worked to complete exhaustion to make that one happen. I'm profoundly grateful for their contribution and look forward to working with them again this summer.
What excites you most about the upcoming season?
The scintillating music of Mozart in Le nozze di Figaro, or maybe the brutal muscularity of Verdi's Macbeth, or maybe the dark Appalachian smokiness of Floyd's Susannah. I don't have to choose! I love opera in repertory!
What is your favorite opera and why?
It's Ariadne auf Naxos by Strauss. I love the interplay of commedia dell'arte as 'low' art and opera as 'high' art, and the illustration of the vicissitudes of a work as it comes to stage and how that affects the collaborators. I was especially spoiled by the production we had here at DMMO in 2004 when Jane Redding sang Zerbinetta with all of her humanistic warmth and Lise Lindstrom sang Ariadne with divine beauty. It was heaven and earth all combined!
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