Opera and Music-theatre
In 1998, Defoort became a composer-in-residence at LOD, a production company specialising in contemporary music theatre in Ghent. His first work for them was the dance piece Passages with Fatou Traoré, premiered in 2001.
His first opera, created in collaboration with director Guy Cassiers was The Woman Who Walked into Doors, after the novel of the same name by Roddy Doyle. It premiered in November 2001 at deSingel in Ghent, before a very successful tour of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the Festival d'Automne in Paris, the Musica festival in Strasbourg and the Ruhrtriennale in Germany. In October 2003, there were three performances in Dublin (the setting of the novel), at the Gaiety Theatre. Defoort split the orchestration between his own Dreamtime jazz ensemble and the classical Beethoven Academy (the Prometheus Ensemble in later performances). On the stage, the role of the main character, Paula Spencer, was also split between the soprano Claron McFadden and the actress Jacqueline Blom, with all other characters being represented by pre-recorded video and projected texts.
In 2003, Defoort worked again with McFadden and Dreamtime in ConVerSations/ConSerVations, a project to synthesise Renaissance and contemporary musics.
His second opera, again with Cassiers, was The House of Sleeping Beauties based on the eponymous novella by Yasunari Kawabata. It received its world premiere at La Monnaie, in May 2009, as part of the kunstenFESTIVALdesArts, before touring the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. The actor Dirk Roofthooft played and sang the lead character of Eguchi, the old man who visits a brothel to lie alongside the bodies of anaesthetized young women, to reflect on the poignant passage of time, the process of ageing and death. Defoort emphasises the emotional differences between the unreal, timeless floating world inside the brothel and the mundane world outside, by using only sung voice inside, and only spoken voice outside.
The Brodsky Concerts, premiered in Geneva in September 2010, pairs the poetry of the Russian Nobel prize winner Joseph Brodsky, recited by Roofthooft, with improvisations at the piano from Kris Defoort to express "that which is impossible to say with words".
The Aix-en-Provence Festival has commissioned an opera from Defoort and the Canadian writer/ director Wajdi Mouawad for the 2013 festival.
Read more about this topic: Kris Defoort
Famous quotes containing the word opera:
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)