Operatic splash with dancers in a fish tank

Original story by Jane Albert, The Australian

It was June 2011 and Bertels was presenting the German choreographer’s dance-theatre company at his Holland Festival when the pair hatched the somewhat madcap plan to transport this behemoth; with its cast of 50 dancers, singers, musicians, flying equipment, costumes and a giant glass fish tank, it is nothing short of a logistical nightmare.

Secure it he did, and next summer Waltz’s Dido & Aeneas will form the centrepiece of Bertels’s second Sydney Festival.

It was something of a happy coincidence that, in acknowledging Bertels would realise this ambition, NSW Arts Minister George Souris also confirmed Bertels’s contract as festival director would be extended to include a fourth term, as director of the 40th Sydney Festival in 2016.

Waltz will travel to Sydney with the production, marking her first trip to Australia and the Sydney debut of her renowned contemporary dance company, Sasha Waltz & Guests. (The Melbourne Festival presented a double bill of her work in 2009 but Waltz didn’t attend.)

Speaking from Berlin, where she is working on an adaptation of Afternoon of a Faun, after which Daniel Barenboim will conduct her production of The Rite of Spring, Waltz is full of enthusiasm and affection for Dido & Aeneas.

“The great experience of Dido & Aeneas, both on a human and artistic level, was changing my own artistic life,” she says of the production, her first foray into choreographic opera, which debuted in Berlin in 2005.

“The opera became my new world of expression.”

Other choreographic operas followed, including Medea and Hector Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette.

The oldest operatic love story in the English language, Henry Purcell’s baroque opera Dido & Aeneas tells the story of Dido, the queen of Carthage, who reluctantly falls in love with Aeneas but ultimately is betrayed when evil sorcerers trick him into abandoning her. With its evocative score and dramatic story-line involving shipwreck, doomed love and witches, the opera has proved fertile creative ground for choreographers such as Mark Morris.

For Waltz, who co-founded her company in Berlin in 1993, the baroque style of Purcell’s only full opera gave her freedom as a director. “The structures were still more open and music partly improvised,” she says.

“The music is so strong that I associated immediately choreographic movements with it, not only in the specially composed dances of the score.”

Waltz’s production opens with the arresting image of the dancers climbing into a 10m glass fish tank, into which they dive and twist and dance while the 7.5 tonnes of water slowly drains before the audience’s eyes.

Each singer is shadowed by a dancer, with Dido represented by an additional dancer, all accompanied by a chamber choir.

Bertels says Dido & Aeneas is one of the largest productions to be brought in by an Australian festival, following on the back of the extraordinary 2002 Sydney show The Flood Drummers.

He believes there is an appetite for large-scale dramatic work along the lines of this year’s opera-meets-fashion fest Semele Walk. “It’s event theatre but not devoid of deep meaning or substantial content,” he says.

“It’s become quite rare for a choreographer to produce a large-scale work. Since Jiri Kylian there are very few who can hold that big a space dramatically and choreographically.

“Sasha is one of the few who can deliver these more lengthy works and come up with something more interesting, and she makes it quite accessible, which is a point of difference.”

A vocal supporter of live accompaniment, Bertels worked hard to have the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra support Dido & Aeneas, but finances eventually put paid to that when, ironically, it proved cheaper to fly in the production’s regular baroque orchestra, Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin. That orchestra also will perform stand-alone festival concerts with its conductor Christopher Moulds.

Also appearing in the Sydney show is Waltz’s daughter Sophia as Cupid, a role Waltz’s son Laszlo also has performed.

Although the show generally has been well received during its nine-year touring life, the critical response in Britain was mixed. “Some reviews were enthusiastic and others were reserved because the conventional journalists were not used yet to the choreographic approach of the opera, which is more subtle and asks for more fantasy by the spectator,” Waltz says.

“The choreography is both abstract and expressive. For me that is not contradictory.”

Dido & Aeneas runs at the Sydney Lyric as part of Sydney Festival from January 16 to 21.