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JONNY DANCIGER
director-designer
Best
Family
Show
Winner
Edfringe '23
Best
Design
Nominee
Offies '24
La Voix Humaine
Sung in French, with 'Active Surtitling'. Performed with numerous companies:
Company: Orchestra Vox | Venue: St John's Auditorium (Oxford) | Paired with Erwartung (Schoenberg)
Company: Cumbria Opera | Venue: Penrith Playhouse | Paired with Frauen-Liebe und Leben (Schubert)
Company: Autana Arts | Venue: Château D'Excideuil (Dordogne, France)
Company: The Opera Studio | Venue: OSO Arts Centre (London)
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Photos by Chris Tribble & Giacomo Giannelli
Director & Technical Design Jonny Danciger
Set Design Emma Turner
Conductor (Orchestra Vox) Hannah von Wiehler
Elle Sofia Kirwan-Baez
Piano Alex Norton
With the audience only privy to one side of a telephone conversation, the subtleties of language become paramount: just how much power can a word have when it hangs, disembodied, on the other end of a telephone line?
In this production, I sought to make the language a character in itself through the projection mapping of surtitles across a blank, institutional set. These would follow the soprano around the stage, grouping or dispersing with her swells of anxiety. This stylisation also helped frame her emotions as heightened, avoiding a false label of 'hysteria'.
These projections are a solution to something that has always irked me about foreign language opera: the disconnection of the surtitle screen. Too often, audiences are forced to make a choice between either watching the action or reading the translation, making it difficult to follow the natural flow of drama. By always bringing the surtitle into the natural eyeline, the subtleties of the soprano's dramatic performance were easier to absorb.
This production was my first to use this technique, which I call 'active surtitling'.
As for the staging provided by Jonny Danciger, also designer, it serves the opera remarkably well. Cocteau's text scrolls with formidable precision over the decorative elements with well-chosen plays of light. The spectator is completely enveloped by the words sung and those which parade, and the loneliness of the woman on stage is all the more poignant. Here are three talented young people who have already had a remarkable career and who are called upon to go very far. A huge bravo!
Association Culturelle Excit'oeil
The Cumbria Opera Festival 2023 was opened perfectly with a double bill of Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine and Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben at the Penrith Playhouse. Their productions represent the pinnacle of performing arts in Cumbria. Sofia Kirwan-Baez excelled as Elle in La voix humaine: a 40-minute one-person opera that depicts a woman’s last phone call before her suicide. In Frauenliebe und -leben – a song cycle about a ‘Woman’s Love and Life’ – Kirwan-Baez again demonstrated why she is one of the UK’s most exciting young sopranos. Accompanied serenely by Alex Norton, her interpretation was as enigmatic as it was exhilarating. The technical design of both shows – where the English subtitles floated around the stage and were a central part of the action – was the highlight: director Jonny Danciger and producers Joe Davies and Lucy Britton created an event to remember.
Robert Wilde, Seen & Heard International
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