From the Rehearsal Room: week 3
Dear digital audience,
It has been a week of coming together: both literally and artistically. On Monday it was full house: not only do we now have our full cast, but we also invited the whole artistic and production team from OperaUpClose and The Arcola for a meet and greet. Besides shaking hands whilst balancing cups of tea, we also presented the model box for the first time. Our world: still small enough to fit on a desk, like a very well-functioning dolls' house. All those lines on the floor do start to make a lot more sense when you look at the set and objects they actually represent. I could see how this information slipped into the minds of the performers when they were rehearsing their next scenes. Suddenly things started to make sense, transitions stated to fall into place: “If my boyfriend would push me away at the house party, I would run upstairs crying and hide under a pillow”, because it’s your party and you can cry if you want to.
Our Designer Rosanna Vize also presented the mood boards for the costumes, which was very exciting! I love the style of the sixties: the shapes, the colours, the different fabrics - so feminine yet so bold and powerful. All I wanted was to dress up and go live in our opera… However that was not the point. More importantly, the costumes would feed into the characters and the way the move themselves across the stage. Although I am sure I was not the only one who got envious about some of the clothes and props.
It’s amazing to have all these creatives in the same room: it’s the first moment you realise what a massive team effort it is to make this production. It’s a bit of a miracle that it all comes together and that the audience (you) will see only half of what is really happening in those couple of hours when you visit the show. I hope that with this blog, I will be able to shed a bit more light on that. Or, that you’ll forget all of it as soon as you set foot in the theatre, because that’s more of the point really.
Annemiek van Elst
Assistant Director, Eugene Onegin
For more information and tickets, please click here.