Gilles Rico, Stage Director: “I Consider Myself First and Foremost a Storyteller.”
Ralph Benatsky, L’auberge du Cheval Blanc, Opéra de Lausanne, 2021. Stage director: Gilles Rico. Photo © Jean-Guy Python
Opera is not just about the music – it is also a spectacle, a theatrical performance that speaks as much to the eyes as to the ears. But who is responsible for the overall theatrical interpretation and look of a specific opera production? TWoA talked to Gilles Rico, a French stage director who has staged and assisted staging operas at prestigious opera houses across Europe.
What exactly does a stage director do?
The stage director sets the tone of how to tell the story that is being presented on stage. I consider myself first and foremost a storyteller. You have a team of people working for you. One person does the costumes, another person does the sets, yet another person will be doing the lights or the video, and you coordinate all that. Your job is to come up with a very strong idea to tell the story of the opera.
How did you get into this profession?
A little bit by chance. I trained as a musician and also as a historian, but theater was always part of my life. Gradually, it became more and more important. Following your heart and meeting the right people helped to build my career as a stage director. I started by learning the craft directly on stage. I think this is always the best: working with mentors, with all sorts of people. This helped me to develop my skills. Originally, I studied the piano, but I was also doing theater on the side. I was very attracted to the mechanics of theater and how you tell a story on stage, how people are actually impersonating characters that suddenly become alive. This process really interested me. Since music is an important element for me, I've always tried to find ways to incorporate my love for theater with music. Opera was obviously the preferred medium for that.
Is your path typical for stage directors?
People come from very different and diverse backgrounds. There are schools that teach you the craft of stage directing and various other jobs within the theater world. Particularly in Germany, they have very good schools for that. In France, that’s not so much the case. There's no formal training, so you really have to learn by imitation, by doing internships, by working with people in order to learn the trade. In the United Kingdom, they have two very important schools, but most of UK based, or UK-born stage directors come from various backgrounds in terms of studies. There isn’t that much formal training. I think Germany is quite unusual because you really have courses that are specifically designed for stage directors. In Berlin, there's even a course for opera directors.
Opera audiences are diverse and have potentially different needs: there are dedicated opera goers who know the history of each work and have seen many productions, there are those who have no previous experience at all, and there are different age groups.
That’s an issue that is being addressed by many opera houses throughout the world at the moment. You have on the one hand, an audience of aficionados who know everything about the intricacies of the plot. If you want to bring new audiences, you have to somehow challenge them. It also depends on who your target audience is. I've done shows for younger audiences that were specifically made for them. Obviously, you change your approach for that. If you want to make it a family event where you're going to have mainly a younger audience, you need to make references to things that will speak to them. That doesn't mean simplifying the plot, because you'll be amazed about children’s capability to get very complex concepts immediately. They're like a blank slate. You have to make the story even more clear for them. It’s part of the stage directing job to show how, when you strip these old stories off the specific historical or contextual circumstances, they still speak to us and how we can relate to them. It's about going back to the more universal aspect of the messages that are being brought forth, and to see how they can still resonate nowadays.
For younger audiences, language is an important factor. For the shows that I did for a younger audience, we translated the opera into the language spoken by the children, which means also rewriting some of the sung passages to adapt them with the music. You have to change the prosody – the rhythmic or sound patterns of the lyrics - which is an interesting exercise. We would also shorten the piece because kids have a shorter attention span: you cannot develop a concept for three hours with kids, but for one hour or one hour and fifteen minutes. There were even instances where the audience actually participated in the opera. They would prepare at school some numbers that they would sing with the performers, and they had a role to play within the story. Engaging with the story is a way to enable them to relate a little bit more to what's being told and what the characters are going through. They can side with one side or the other - not to make it a Manichean conflict between good and evil. For me, it's quite important to show that each character is never entirely good or bad but has got fifty shades of grey. Like actual human beings. An extremely bad character can suddenly have some redeeming feature. And the same with a good character, who can have a dark side. It's about showing that complexity of human nature on stage.
What is the best way for a first-time opera goer to approach the experience?
Ideally, reading the story ahead of time really helps to understand what's going on. At the same time, I think it’s the job of the stage director to make the story understandable for first time viewers, and also to bring new elements for people who have seen the opera many, many times. The difficulty with the operatic repertoire, mainly the 19th century repertoire, is the dated nature of the libretto. In certain styles like bel canto, the libretti – the scripts of the opera - were not really well crafted, because the opera was a pretext for vocal display and musical display. As a stage director, you have to kind of create another story, to make it a bit more exciting for nowadays. For example, when you have loads of repetitions of the same word over and over, for three minutes, then the story needs to keep going, because the characters are going through something, and the music helps you to tell the story. Not only the words are the medium, but the music is a driving force in storytelling, because you have a window that opens into the emotions and the psychology of the characters. It’s quite crucial to use the music as the background and as the force. If your approach is based only on the text, you're missing something. And if you don't care about the text at all, you're also missing something. For me, the music is the most reliable source that helps you frame each scene, to know, when suddenly the heat is going to be turned up. The music tells you a lot about the dramaturgy of what you're trying to say.
What is you guiding principle?
It’s the job of the stage director together with the musical director and the performers to help convey the story and make things obvious. It all comes back to how you tell a narrative. On a theater stage, when people cannot follow what’s at stake, after a while, you create boredom, and it gets lost. One of my mentor’s always said that the most important thing in our job is to get ONE idea. If you get one idea right, then the whole coherence of what you're presenting on stage will stem from it. That's the aim you're trying to achieve. You're trying to convey that one idea to the audience.
This also helps to address the following difficulty in opera: you replay the same play over and over and over again. It's not necessarily about finding something fresh all the time. It's about finding angles. It's the same object you are looking at, but in a different light and in a light that is maybe more telling for us than for the audience at the time. Sometimes, it's just a question of perspective. If you take a classical work of opera, something like Carmen. Do you place yourself within the eyes of Carmen? Is that the point of view you're trying to convey? Is it her point of view, or is it the one of Don José, or of another character? Is it Escamillo?
Also, since the very beginning, opera has also been designed as a spectacle. For me, it's quite important to have that visual dimension, which you can achieve by traditional scenography, a machine set moving all over and stuff like that. Or you can use new tools that are more telling, maybe to younger audiences, like video, interactive videos and 3D holographic projections and things like that.
Pauline Viardot, Cendrillon, Opéra de Lausanne, 2018. Stage director: Gilles Rico. Photo © Alan Humerose
Talking about opera as a spectacle – how can one keep opera a spectacle while making it more sustainable?
It’s a real challenge, for sure. The economy of opera is not like musical theater, like a West End or Broadway show where you design your show and you know it's going to be played for a year or two non-stop. In opera, the run is usually six or eight shows. If you're in a repertoire theater in Germany, you know that there's going to be some bring backs in the next years. That means that you spend half a million euros on a set and costumes for six or eight shows and five weeks of rehearsal, which is a lot of energy for not much. A great deal has been done to try to alleviate that weight: frequently, you have co-productions where you share the same show with various opera houses across Europe, so then the show will travel and will be performed, as well as being revived, in the same houses for several years.
Another way is to recycle the sets. You can have stock sets build in a very effective way, so that you know you can keep the structures and just change the decoration. When you design your shows, you always have to think about the environmental impact. This question wasn’t considered before; it just became a part of considerations five or ten years ago. The other aspect is the human factor. It's not very sustainable to have people flying from many countries into a place and then perform. But it’s very difficult, because if you want to get the best singers, you have to be very international. The German system is actually quite sustainable, because you have an ensemble system, which means that most of the shows throughout the seasons are going to be performed by people who are on the payroll of the theater. External singers are in the minority. This is a quite a viable system to reduce the environmental impact.
What are your top five operas to recommend to people who know nothing about opera but would love to learn more?
In my top five are Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, because it's a fantastic theater play and it's fun. It's fast paced. The music is absolutely amazing. The libretto is extremely well built, and it also has some modern resonance. You can do it in a very traditional way; you will have fun. You can do it very modern; you will still have fun. Another one would be Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. It's a French opera which is all about the word and how you pronounce that. Every line is so symbolic of something else that it leaves the room for imagination very open. Another opera would be Jenufa by Janáček, because of what it says and because of the beauty of the music. I quite like strong female characters, which you have in The Marriage of Figaro, in Pelléas and in Jenufa. Carmen would be another one. Carmen has got the universal nature of a myth. When you strip it of all the orientalist, fashionable 19th century discourse, you get something which is quite powerful and strong and also very easily accessible. In Carmen, you can really build something with many layers. That's one of the reasons why it's one of the most performed operas ever. I'm actually working on it at the moment; I'll be directing it very soon.
There is repertoire that I didn't know, and I used to dismiss and hate, but that I'm now very fond of. I like very much all the light operas by Offenbach, which I found harder to stage than a tragedy. Comedy is extremely hard, it's all about timing and precision and there's always a thin line between trying to be funny and witty and then failing with the timing. I find the mechanics interesting; you can also blend more choreographic elements into that.
What are your thoughts about live-performances versus watching opera on a screen?
Opera is about what you experience in the theatre, surrounded by the musical acoustics. It's the fact of having several hundred people experiencing the same emotions at the same time, and that you cannot have on a screen. The screen is a lucrative business, and people want to promote the opera and to make it more accessible so that more people can see it, but often they don't give the economic means to do that properly. There's very little talk between the TV director and the stage director. We don't get any say in the final cut of what is shown. Sometimes it's so infuriating because you spend time devising an image for the big stage, and then they will focus on the hands of a character, while something very important is happening outside the screen. There is only good thing about the overwhelming presence of the screen for opera: it has changed the way performers act. They now act in a more cinematic way than they used to. Earlier, the goal was to act for the back row in the Met auditorium, forty meters away, so the acting was a little bit bigger and more outrageous. Now you can expect from the performers to have a much more intimate way of acting and portraying relations, which is more naturalistic in a way as well. This development has happened over the last decades. Singers are now conscious that every detail in a performance is going to be scrutinized in close-ups. It's surprising what you can see as an audience member in terms of facial expression. If somebody is just acting with the face in a scene, as an audience member, even if you're 15 meters away, you will see it.