The Canadian Opera Company's popular Inside Opera video series is back, this time with a look at our final production of the spring season, Dialogues des Carmélites. 

In our latest Inside Opera video, meet three talented Canadian artists starring in Robert Carsen's production of Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites. Sopranos Isabel Bayrakdarian, Adrianne Pieczonka and mezzo-soprano Judith Forst discuss the power and strength found in the music of Poulenc's masterpiece, and discuss how the unique staging elements heighten the anxiety and fear in their performances.

Catch up with the last Inside Opera video,  Salome, Playing with Shadows and explore our production of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor with: Creating Lucia Part One,Creating Lucia Part Two and William Zeitler and the Glass Armonica.

By Nikita Gourski, Development Communications Officer

Imagine the choreographer who turns to the libretto of Salome for the first time, looking for insight on the famous Dance of the Seven Veils. They find only the briefest and most general of instructions to guide their work: “Salome dances the Dance of the Seven Veils.” For a pivotal scene, it’s not much to go on.

Yet that brevity opens up the performance to a multitude of possible and legitimate interpretations. By saying next to nothing about how the dance should look, the libretto seems to recognize that an elusive and indefinable quality is woven into the dance… a quality that might resist pre-determined charting precisely because it originates from a mysterious place of self-expression.

Salome by Paul Klee, 1920 and The Dance of Salome by Benozzo Gozzoli, 1462

Salome was adapted from Oscar Wilde’s one-act play, in which the author omits specific choreographic instructions with the very same phrase that the opera’s libretto echoes, unchanged, 13 years later. Things only get more puzzling when we read Wilde’s personal inscription to illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. “For Aubrey,” Wilde wrote, “the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance.”