Today we finished an... interesting unit in our Opera Characterization class - the Extreme Aria Project. Each class member chose an aria with which they were very comfortable, and then we went down the list, setting each aria to an extreme, eurotrash worthy staging.
An example was a "Caro Nome", about a vampire victim who ends up giving herself to the vampire willingly, and dying onstage. Or today, "O Mio Babbino Caro", about a father-daughter incest case, where the daughter spent the aria deciding whether to end it by killing herself, or her dad. It sounds nuts, I know - but it brought up a lot of interesting issues, technically and dramatically. We ended up spending an hour as a class working on "dying slowly, in agony, to music". It's something you have to deal with a lot as an operatic actor! On Monday, we took an hour to work on over-schmaltzy, "running into each other's arms" scenes.
Somehow, you have to make this stuff compelling to an audience. There has to be enough reality behind these extreme stagings and characterizations to keep an audience on the edge of their seats. It's easier to work on that skill with high stakes, bizarro concepts than it is with more pedestrian ideas. Now, I guess the trick is to apply it all to "regular" acting...
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