Creative team quit Dutch National Opera
OperaWe hear that the leading choreographer-director Wayne McGregor has left the upcoming productions of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Samy Moussa’s Antigone. Also leaving are designer Vicki Mortimer and the actor Ben Whishaw, who was supposed to be the Speaker.
The Dutch are being economical with the facts:
We hereby inform you as a visitor about a change in the production, with the original title Jocasta’s Line. Because director and choreographer Wayne McGregor had to withdraw from the production due to private circumstances, we regret that it is not possible to bring his vision of this diptych to our stage. However, we are pleased and grateful that we have been able to put together a new artistic team at such short notice, allowing both works – Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Samy Moussa’s Antigone – to have their (world) premiere.
The new production, entitled Oedipus Rex / Antigone, will be led by both the Dutch director Mart van Berckel (who created the controversial Ändere die Welt! during the Opera Forward Festival 2023) and the Dutch choreographer and director Nanine Linning, director of Scapino Ballet Rotterdam. Together they will merge the worlds of classical tragedy and contemporary music in a unique theatrical experience. The cast of singers and musicians remains unchanged: you can still enjoy international stars who share the stage with our impressive men’s and women’s choir. The involvement of the dancers of Dutch National Ballet will be more limited than originally planned.
Sexual harassment or hope to get some audience?
The difficulty nowadays is indeed, that it has become very difficult to find-out what is what.
The reason that some type of ballet productions try to become more and more ‘sensational’ is that there is still the modernist idea lingering that any new production of whatever kind, has to ‘break boundaries’, has to ‘transcend limitations’, as if to reach the ultimate freedom of expression. This stems from the completely outdated idea that the arts have been strangled by rules, suffocating conventions, lack of invention etc. etc. and that only in rejecting anything from something that was created in the past can offer some exciting stimulation. And this is the immature idea that achievement is always the result of freedom from limitations, while in reality ANY art in ANY period or culture, if it is good, is the result of handling limitations in such a way that they are transcended. Think, for instance, of the icon of individualistic, groundbreaking freedom in classical music: Mr van Beethoven. He took an existing tradition, filled to the brim with rules, but he took them all on, and bended them to his own very personal interpretation, bringing them on another scale, another level, but still as tightly organised as anything of great music that was written before him.
and this is supposed to make you want to go? “. . . who created the controversial Ändere die Welt! . . .”
Do the General Directors and Artistic Managers of these European houses and festivals go to the public and ask if they want to spend their entire opera going experiences in Konzept productions? I frankly want to music, story and the singers to star in any opera I go to hear and see and not some producer, their set builder and costume designer trying to take over the show. Here we see the prima donnas are the production team and not the singers.