Conducted by Jose Louis Moscovitch
Choreography by Yannis Adoniou
Scenery by Jean-Francois Revon
Costumes by Miller James
Orphee was presented by Opera Santa Barbara in April of 2012. The scenic design consisted of two convex white walls which reconfigured throughout the space to delineate the different scenes in the opera. Video projection was a major design element taking us from location to location. Because of the atypical projection surface, curved 3 dimensional surfaces, the projections had to be carefully cut and cropped to map on to these different shapes as we wanted the walls to be a strong visual image with the projections and the dark black surround to help convey the feelings of mourning, death, and the underworld.
Inspiration in imagery came from looking at the natural world. In the opening scene a fractured marble wall looms over the grieving Orpheus. As we decides to risk a journey through hell to return his beloved to life, lava slowly starts oozing its way through the cracks and crevices of the wall. Hades itself is an undulating orange spiderweb overlaid on a rich red cyc. The Elysian fields an eternal spring with flowers and petals and patterns. The torturous journey back is a termporally distorted shaft of ice which crossfades to a cold rain when Eyridice once again dies. The return of Amore and Eruidice’s new again life, fades out the rain with gentle rich clouds over a deep blue sky, and a slowly emerging field of flowers.