Join Ensemble OrQuesta for a production that explores fantasy, reality and duality while giving free rein to wit, knockabout comedy and the dazzling outbursts of the Queen of the Night.
Five performers bring to life a story of love, betrayal and abandonment that has moved audiences for over three centuries. Based on Virgil’s Aeneid, the opera follows the story of Dido, Queen of Carthage, who falls for the Trojan hero Aeneas, knowing he is destined to leave her.
You’re bringing both The Magic Flute and Dido and Aeneas to Grimeborn this year, two very different works separated by nearly a century. How do you hold both in your head simultaneously, and does directing one inform how you approach the other?
Fortunately for me, both productions were created quite a while ago, so revisiting them feels like returning to old friends rather than starting from scratch. This year marks the tenth anniversary of our production of Dido and Aeneas, which premiered in June 2016, and we’re delighted to welcome Rosemary Carlton-Willis back in the title role she created. It is probably Ensemble OrQuesta’s most minimalist production. This revival also has a unique twist: Rosemary and Helen May will share the roles of Dido and the Sorceress, with the audience deciding who sings which role each evening.
The Magic Flute, by contrast, is full of energy, humour and theatrical invention. It has only been performed once before, in 2019, and I’m thrilled to bring it back with such an outstanding cast. Although the two operas are worlds apart, both remind me that opera can tell stories powerfully with very little, which has always been central to Ensemble OrQuesta’s artistic identity.
Ensemble OrQuesta is committed to historically informed performance, but your productions are also described as physically inventive and theatrically vital. How do you reconcile those two impulses, and where does period authenticity end and theatrical freedom begin?
I see our work as having two distinct sides. Musically, we always try to understand the style, rhetoric and performance practice of the period as deeply as we can. With Mozart, that’s naturally less evident because we’re working with greatly reduced orchestral forces, but you’ll still hear a freedom and flexibility in the performance that feels very much our own. In the Baroque repertoire that approach becomes even clearer, as we perform on historical instruments and embrace the expressive freedom that lies at the heart of the music.
The staging follows a different philosophy. Our minimalist productions rely on carefully structured movement, with much of the action choreographed rather than naturalistic. In Baroque opera, I often say that time itself stands still. The audience isn’t watching everyday life unfold; they’re invited into a world where emotion stretches and shapes time. Dido works particularly through tableaux, where the flow of time becomes subjective. The Magic Flute, on the other hand, combines physical theatre, naturalistic English dialogue and an almost bare stage to create a visually clean, imaginative production.
The Magic Flute is famously resistant to coherent interpretation. Its plot is riddled with inconsistencies and its allegories have been argued over for centuries. Do you try to resolve those contradictions in your production, or do you lean into the instability?
I don’t think The Magic Flute was written to be solved like a philosophical puzzle. It was written to entertain. At its heart it’s a wonderfully imaginative story of good and evil, full of comedy, fantasy and unforgettable music. Personally, I don’t think trying to explain every contradiction is ultimately the point.
Of course, some aspects of the libretto feel dated today, particularly its treatment of women, but that’s true of much eighteenth-century opera. Rather than pretending those elements aren’t there, I think we acknowledge them, take them with a pinch of salt and enjoy everything that still makes the work so magical.
In our production, I’ve also avoided presenting it as something happening to real people. Instead, everything unfolds inside Tamino’s imagination or dreams. There is even a small nod to the 1986 film Labyrinth, with David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly, which I watched countless times as a child.
The Dido and Aeneas revival gives the audience a direct hand in the casting on three of the five nights. What does it change about the experience of directing a production when a key creative decision is handed to the room?
For me, surprisingly little. It changes far more for the performers than it does for the director. I often joke that I came up with the idea and now they have to deal with it!
Rosemary Carlton-Willis and Helen May are two of Ensemble OrQuesta’s most experienced artists, and both know this production and our performance style incredibly well. That’s what makes the experiment so exciting. Each of them brings something slightly different to Dido and to the Sorceress, so the audience’s choice genuinely creates a different performance every night. I love the idea that no two evenings are exactly the same, even though the production itself remains unchanged.
You trained across three countries and work across conducting and directing. Do you experience those as genuinely distinct roles, or has the boundary between them dissolved for you over time?
The boundary has completely dissolved. I think some people assume I conduct, direct, design and occasionally even perform because I want complete artistic control, but the reality is much simpler. Most of those roles came out of necessity rather than ambition.
I started as a singer, then founded and conducted a vocal ensemble in Brazil when I was fifteen. Singing and conducting developed side by side for many years, while directing arrived almost by accident. The other roles—lighting, set, costumes and choreography—followed because, very often, there simply wasn’t the budget to ask someone else to do them.
Looking back, that necessity shaped Ensemble OrQuesta’s artistic identity. It taught me to think about every element of a production as part of the same storytelling process. Today I’m fortunate to work alongside a wonderful core creative team, whose ideas constantly challenge and enrich my own, but I think that unified way of creating productions has remained with us.
Grimeborn has a particular identity as a festival: fringe in spirit, but with serious artistic ambitions. What does that context ask of you as a director that a more institutional house wouldn’t?
It asks us to think creatively rather than simply think bigger, and that’s something Ensemble OrQuesta has always embraced. We’d rather ignite the audience’s imagination than overwhelm it with spectacle. Our productions are built on imagination, trusting performers and audiences to create a world together with very few physical resources.
That’s why Grimeborn has always felt like a natural home for us. We’ve been part of the festival every year since 2017, and next year we’ll celebrate ten years of performing there. The festival shares our belief that artistic ambition isn’t measured by the size of a budget, but by the strength of an idea and the commitment of the people bringing it to life. That’s a philosophy we’ve always believed in, and it’s one of the reasons we keep coming back.