Calgary Opera builds new set for rigoletto

Construction is underway for the Rigoletto sets designed by award winning designer Bretta Gerecke.

Director Glynis Leyshon on Rigoletto:

"Written in 1851, Verdi’s Rigoletto remains to this day a consummate work celebrating the ‘outsider.' Each of the main characters, without exception, is deformed… broken in some significant way. We see fractured and flawed human beings – physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally broken individuals who are driven into a dark and remorseless spiral of violence. Not a pleasant world but an unforgettable one…brought to dazzling life by Verdi’s music.

Drawn by the strong metaphors at the centre of the piece – entrapment, caged humanity, a world where power is absolute and the structure of society is fiercely hierarchical - we began to look at a kind of ‘circus’ metaphor . Not of course a literal, Barnum and Bailey kind of circus but rather a metaphorical world that would allow the passions and tensions of the opera to play out in an evocative landscape filled with the iconography of the circus as it might have been envisioned by Fellini after dreaming about Bosch and then photographed by Arbus!"