If you’ve been following my posts, you might recall that last fall I wrote about photographing a dress rehearsal for the opera Marriage of Figaro. This past week I was hired to photograph a dress rehearsal for the University of Wisconsin School of Music production of Transformations. This is an opera in two acts by Conrad Susa with a libretto based on ten poems by Anne Sexton from her 1971 book of the same name.
Each of the ten scenes is a retelling of a story by the Brothers Grimm, including some familiar ones such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, and Rapunzel. This makes parts of the opera a little easier to follow. The stories are, however, a little more adult than the originals. Since it’s in English, you don’t have to brush up on your Italian or German to understand what’s happening. There are supertitles, however, just in case you need help with the dialog.
The setting of the show is a therapy session. There are only eight vocalists in the cast and they remain on stage and in the same costumes for the entire production. They take on different roles as the stories change. Characters who are not in a particular scene relax in chairs and pretend to smoke cigarettes or read newspapers and magazines. Sometimes they sit and watch the active characters.
I’ve said this before, but one of my main challenges is dealing with the lighting. Since I don’t have fast lenses (f/4 and f/3.5-5.6), I have to use an ISO of 1600 just to shoot at 1/60 sec. So, movement by the characters is something I really have to watch out for. Also, since I had never seen this production before, I really had to be alert to how the action was unfolding in order to catch shots that illustrate the opera. For a job like this the director doesn’t ask me to watch for particular vocalists or scenes, he just wants me to document the production. I submit a dozen or so photos the next day that can be distributed to the press and a few days later I deliver a DVD with the final picks. Out of 509 raw originals I ended up with 150 final edited photos. That was, I thought, a pretty good yield. I do most of the editing in Lightroom and use Photoshop on some images that need more attention.
In addition to the photos that illustrate overall scenes or interaction of the characters, I try to capture solo images of the vocalists. The main characters usually provide plenty of opportunities for this, the lessor roles can be challenging.
Opening night was Friday, March 11. The initial reviews were very good (see http://isthmus.com/arts/stage/university-opera-transformations/). There’s another production tonight, March 13, and one on Tuesday, March 15. So, you still have an opportunity to catch a performance.