Ho Ka Kei’s take on the last canonical part of the story of the House of Atreus; Iphigenia and the Furies (on Taurian Land) opened last night at the Aki Studio in a production directed by Jonathan Seinen. It’s a very funny and very thought provoking take on the story that will likely be best known to opera goers as the plot of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride. I want to start with the three questions that the playwright set out to answer:
- What does it mean for mainly POC’s and marginalized folks to be taking this tale on?
- What do we gain/ what do we lose/ what may feel erased/ what is truly universal about this tale or is that an assumption due to its status in the canon?
- When we end a cycle, say a cycle of vengeance, what other cycles emerge?
This interests me especially because I’m not in any real sense a marginalized person. Indeed I’m almost “archetypically” of the group that has made the classical canon its own; i.e a white male with a traditional classical education(1).
At the COC nothing really blew me away in 2018. Rufus Wainwright’s Hadrian was better than I had feared and, I think, with revisions could be rather good. In the form we saw it, it felt somewhat overblown and didactic. It was also great to see Robert Carsen’s Eugene Onegin finally get an airing in Toronto; especially with a very good, young, largely Canadian cast. Nothing from Opera Atelier really floated my boat this year though. Are Against the Grain or Tapestry major companies now? One could argue that they are sailing under false colours in describing themselves as “Indy”. In any event they each provided one of the year’s highlights with the spectacular Orphée from the former and the best new work of the year; The Overcoat, from the latter. 
operaramblings 