By Dennis Oda, Star-Bulletin
Les Ceballos, playing Malcolm, holds aloft a head
in a bag in the finale of Macbeth.
Double, double
toil and trouble ...
Fires burn and cauldrons bubble
By Ruth Bingham
as the witches come to HOT
Special to the Star-BulletinPower, ambition, intrigue, murder, madness, witchcraft -- just another night at the opera. Tomorrow, Hawaii Opera Theater opens its final opera for this season, Verdi's setting of Shakespeare's "Macbeth."
Although the opera remains faithful to the play, Verdi did make a few changes to condense acts and eliminate minor characters. Perhaps the biggest change was to expand the witches' role: Three witches became an entire chorus and ballet corps. While Shakespeare created a complex court intrigue, Verdi focused on three lead roles: Lady Macbeth, Macbeth and the all-important witches.
Casting Verdi's witches is something of a challenge: One must find either dancers who can sing or singers who can dance. Stage Director Henry G. Akina has chosen to split the role. The chorus will represent witches as priestesses, keepers of knowledge who communicate through the language of music, while dancers represent their more threatening aspect, communicated through the language of movement.
Toward this end, HOT is collaborating with the Iona Pear Dance Theatre, new artistic territory for both organizations as well as for Hawaii audiences. The Iona Pear Dance Theatre, supported by Nova Arts Foundation, draws on award-winning Artistic Director Cheryl Flaharty's background in contemporary modern dance and in improvisational Japanese butoh, a unique synthesis reflective of Hawaii's multi-culturalism.
Because Flaharty and her dancers incorporate improvisation, every performance is different. Their dancing emerges from a vocabulary of movements developed during their explorations into what it means to be a witch.
Rehearsals have incorporated meditation, research, discussion, and hours of translating the various aspects of being a witch into physical movement. How do the elements earth, wind, fire and water move in the body? How do witches' feet, or hands, or faces move? Do witches interact with or within -- time and space? Do they relate to the natural world? The supernatural? The spiritual?
By Dennis Oda, Star-Bulletin
The Iona Pear Dance Company plays the witches
in Hawaii Opera Theatre's "Macbeth."
Apropos of their new interpretation, Akina and Flaharty have expanded the witches' roles beyond Verdi's two main scenes. Witches, as witches do, seep from the shadows, visible to some but not to all. Do they observe or do they control? Do they reveal truth or obscure it? Is their world real or illusion? Tomorrow night's audience will have to decide for themselves. ...In opera, real witches and warlocks conjure truth from illusion, working magic behind the scenes. These days illusion is more than smoke and incantations. About 300 people are putting incalculable hours into "Macbeth." Makeup personnel alone will put in more than 2,000 hours.
Methods of conjuring are also considerably more high-tech in the real world. Set and Lighting Designer Peter Dean Beck, for example, works with banks of some 300 lights, controlling the whole with a computer board. Each light must be aimed, focused, shaped with shutters and colored by hand, and then its intensity and "look" entered into the computer.
The advantage of a computer is that lighting can be subtle and complex; the disadvantage is that cues are programmed. If a performer misses a staging cue and steps into the wrong spot, he or she is out of luck and in the dark.
In "Macbeth," about 100 "light" cues must be synchronized with music and staging. The crew sees the cues intact just a few days before opening night, with only two additional rehearsals left to make adjustments.
Furthermore, a light is never "just" a light in opera. It sets the mood, tells the audience where to look and sculpts special effects in addition to helping create the illusion. It can become a lead performer, but most often functions as a silent partner.
Lighting is only part of a whole: Set design, wigs, makeup, costumes, props, etc., are equally complex. Into their cauldrons, these backstage wizards drop lights, fabric, wood and paint , and pull out a world born of the imagination. It is a world that singers bring to life with their voices.
Macbeth
Showtimes: 8 p.m. tomorrow, 4 p.m. Sunday and 7:30 p.m. March 3 and 5
