When I told a few people that I was working on a story about choreographers in opera, there was often a pause. “Wait … what?,” they would say. Then they’d nod, “Oh yes, like when they bring in professional dancers to do a big waltz or something.” Yes, I’d respond, but that is by no means all that they do. A skilled choreographer can make an opera production hum in ways that an audience might never notice but will recognize somewhere in their bones.
As an apprentice director with Atelier lyrique de l’Opéra de Montréal in the 1990s, Alain Gauthier “grew up in the opera house,” he says. Since then, he’s directed many productions for Montréal and other opera houses across Canada and the U.S. Occasionally, he’s been able to work with choreographers; most often, however, usually for budgetary reasons, he has not. “It’s ironic,” says Gauthier. “I rarely work with choreographers, but I love to do it. A lot of opera houses do not have the budget to hire a choreographer unless it’s absolutely necessary, but sometimes you have to make the chorus move — not dance per se, but there’s some rhythm or pattern to it. I have done a lot of shows where I have had to improvise that movement myself, and I’m pretty good at it, but working with a real choreographer is a blessing.”
What they bring, Gauthier states, is a different way of thinking. “I see opera as storytelling; they see it as organized, like math — four counts here, six counts there. They are like musicians that way and I think it’s easier for the singers to connect with
