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The Nightingale And Other Short Fables

THE NIGHTINGALE AND OTHER SHORT FABLES by Igor Stravinsky, directed by Robert Lepage, with Olga Peretyatko, ­Lothar Odinius, Ilya Bannik, Laura Albino, Michael Uloth, Adam Luther and Peter Barrett. Presented by the Canadian Opera Company at the Four Seasons Centre (145 Queen West). Opens Saturday (October 17) and runs in rep to November 5. $62-$292, stu/youth discounts. 416-363-8231. See listing.


Don’t expect anything traditional in the staging of Igor Stravinsky’s The Nightingale And Other Short Fables.[rssbreak]

How about this for starters: the action of the second act (The Nightingale) takes place in the orchestra pit, which has been flooded with 67 tonnes of water. You won’t, though, see bass fiddles doubling as lifeboats or violins as paddles – the orchestra and chorus will be onstage.

In the pit’s waist-deep pool, singers will manipulate puppets to tell Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about a nightingale that stops Death from claiming the Chinese emperor.

The director who dreamt up this astounding bit of staging is Robert Lepage, whose company, Ex Machina, recently wowed Toronto audiences with the nine-hour Lipsynch.

Puppets inspired this collection of short Stravinsky works, a world premiere in which little of the material is, strictly speaking, operatic.

“Years ago I watched a video of Stravinsky’s Oedipus in which masks transformed the singers,” recalls Lepage. “Michael Curry did the puppets for that production, and I was fascinated by the meeting point between its theatricality and music.”

Curry collaborates on the current Canadian Opera Company (COC) production, which next year travels to co-producing companies in Aix-en-Provence and Lyon. Not surprisingly, only a few opera houses have the facilities and courage to tackle something this challenging.

With The Nightingale as his starting point, Lepage gathered a series of brief Stravinsky works about animals for the first act, including the chamber piece Renard (The Fox).

“It occurred to me that puppetry is a solution to the problem of making animals sing,” says the director, whose first opera, a double bill of Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung, premiered at the COC and became an international hit.

The visuals for The Nightingale draw on chinoiserie, a loose and fanciful European interpretation of Chinese design dating from the 17th century. That connected nicely with Lepage’s desire to make puppetry a major part of the evening.

“We’ve made use of various Asian puppetry styles, including Japanese Bunraku, Taiwanese glove puppetry and shadow puppetry, as well as Vietnamese water puppetry for The Nightingale.”

Still, Lepage admits that water in the pit creates problems.

“In addition to the weight, there are temperature and humidity issues, for the singers as well as the hall. I always think that a production smells and tastes of something I don’t want the main impression here to be that of chlorine.

“The show has to be sensual, but we don’t want things to become so warm that the theatre turns into a Turkish steam bath.”

jonkap@nowtoronto.com

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