The 74th season of Austria’s Bregenz Festival will begin on July 17. The Bregenz Festival is a performing arts festival that celebrates opera for a whole month.
As in past summers, more than 200,000 people will descend on Bregenz, a lakeside city with about 29,500 people at the base of Pfänder mountain. Various performances—this season includes two versions of Don Quixote (one opera and one musical theater), a musical theater performance of François Sarhan's Wunderwandelwelt, Arthur Schnitzler's play La Ronde (which will also be performed as a concert), Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and a series of performances called Musik & Poesie—take place in three different locations, and as is tradition, the prize show is performed nightly on a massive stage floating on Lake Constance, a nearly 40-mile-long lake at the foot of the Alps.
The set for this year’s lakeside show, however, is quite different than previous sets. This year would feature Rigoletto, a tragic opera about a disfigured jester trying to protect his daughter from a lecherous duke. But what makes this set different? Almost every single part of this stage moves.
“The challenge was really to invent something that’s not been seen here,” says this year’s stage director and designer, Philipp Stölzl. “That was a bit of a process; we threw our first idea into the trash can at some point and started again from scratch. We finally ended with a design that offers a lot of movement and transformation, which is really a fresh approach for Bregenz. Most of the previous productions have been rather static, more like sculptures.”
...the set for Rigoletto takes design to the extreme, with a 45-foot-tall jester's head flanked by two hands, one holding a balloon. Every part of the set moves except for the hand holding the balloon. To hold up the massive weight of the head (nearly 40 tons on its own, and hitting abut 150 tons with the machinery attached to make it move), the stage is built on 119 wood and steel piles driven almost 20 feet into the lakebed. The hand on the left, powered by a hydraulic swivel, moves like a human hand and opens to about 37 feet tall. The frill around the jester's neck appears to ruffle in the wind. Speakers for the show are incorporated into the set: five in the head and two in the index finger of the right hand.
More details about this story over at Smithsonian.com.
(Video Credit: VOL.AT - Vorarlberg Online)