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Mark Foehringer Directs Festival Opera’s Traviata

Ken Bullock on June 24, 2011
Andrew Whitfield and Rebecca Davis rehearsing for La traviata

“The more I work with talented singers,” said choreographer Mark Foehringer, who is stage directing Festival Opera’s production of La traviata, which opens July 9 at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek, “the more I feel how physical singing really is — how they feel the note in their bodies.... Any good performance is very visceral, not only for the performers, but what the people watching get from hearing and seeing it, even with symphony performances.”

La traviata will feature soprano Rebecca Davis in her Festival Opera debut as Violetta and tenor Andrew Whitfield as Alfredo.

Foehringer, a Fulbright scholar in dance, founded the Mark Foehringer Dance Project in San Francisco in 1996. Some of his dancers will appear in La traviata. He stage directed Lucia di Lammermoor for Festival Opera last year, after assisting conductor and stage director (and Festival Opera’s artistic and music director) Michael Morgan (who will conduct La traviata) with Faust and Midsummer Night’s Dream the two previous years.

Britten, Gounod, Donizetti, and now Verdi: That’s quite a spread in terms of music and action on stage.

“One of the best things Mark brings to opera,” commented Morgan, “is imagination: how to get from place to place onstage to convey the emotion of the character. That’s true in ballet, too; in opera, there’s the help of the words. Mark has a great eye for that, looking at singers to see what they need — and can do — physically to go with what they can do vocally, not for one to contradict the other. We want performers to move in ways audiences can identify with, ways a real person would move.”

Morgan backed up Foehringer’s sense of the physicality of singing opera, relating it to his work as conductor.

“Some singers just stand and sing. But if we look at a few singers — like tenor Thomas Glenn at Festival Opera last year — we can see them physicalize the music, see the impact as they’re singing it. From the conductor’s standpoint, where I have to see what will happen next, or try to read bodies for what they need next, I see — and the audience sees — what the emotion is from some singers, not just hear it.”

Foehringer was born in Minnesota and moved with his family to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he studied and performed dance. His father, a Lutheran minister, had been drawn there by a dream he had of a statue of Christ with its arms stretched out, which he identified with Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro’s famous Art Deco sculpture atop a mountain peak.

Foehringer often attended the opera with his parents in Sao Paulo. “La traviata was their favorite. I loved the sound of it when I was little, but grew up not knowing what it was about. I guess they didn’t want to tell me it was about a young guy and an older courtesan with tuberculosis!”

He studied ballet with a teacher trained in Europe who also adored that opera. “We would spend hours talking about it: the aesthetics of the different performances she’d seen. And we’d talk about the difference between ballet and opera.”

Foehringer started out “waving a palm leaf” as a supernumerary with an opera ballet chorus, and later toured for a decade with Cisne Negro Dance. Although not a Brazilian, he was steeped in Brazilian culture. “If I hadn’t grown up there, I wouldn’t have the perspective I do, not just artistically, but politically and culturally. And part of Brazilian culture is talking with your hands, gesturing with your eyes.... When I came back to the U.S. in my 30s, people must’ve thought, Who is this person?

As for his directing style, ”It’s important to find a way for a performer to make a movement — something in their body, their physicality — then push it to get dramatic emphasis,” Foehringer said. “There are similarities between ballet and opera: body types for certain ballet roles in certain companies, like sopranos or coloraturas only singing certain things ... or visually, the corps de ballet all do the same movement and the opera chorus sings the same things together.”

He went on: “I tell them stories, tell them I want these stories going on in their groupings, to give a sense of belonging to the scene, and some weight visually. They need information, to feel they own [their roles]. I think they like that: the freedom to be able to collaborate.”

Foehringer concluded: “In the end, you want to make [an opera production] as real as possible, not only for yourself, the performers, but for the audience. Nobody wants somebody faking it. Can you make an audience believe in the love between Alfredo and Violetta? That it’s really going on in front of your eyes, with that overlay of beautiful music, the singing coming out of their mouths? That there’s life in it? We want the audience to come along with that — alive, present.”