Photo Via Milwaukee Opera Theatre - milwaukeeoperatheatre.org
Antonin Dvořák’s 'Rusalka'
Erin Sura (Second Wood Nymph), Brennan Martinez (Third Wood Nymph) and Tabetha Steege (First Wood Nymph) in 'Rusalka'
She’s a beautiful water nymph but she’s unhappy. Desperately wanting to be human, Rusalka desires what the wider world around her calls a normal life. It ends badly for her. Milwaukee Opera Theatre and Danceworks Performance MKE revisits Antonin Dvořák’s opera Rusalka with a fresh set of eyes.
The show will be the two companies’ eighth coproduction and their second take on Rusalka. Once again, they have trimmed Dvořák’s three-hour opera to 75 minutes. “We asked ourselves, ‘What is the shortest sentence to describe Rusalka? What’s the smallest container we can get it into?’” says MOT’s artistic director, Jill Anna Ponasik.
The creative team reduced the running time not with a hammer but a scalpel, carefully peeling away characters, choruses and long instrumental passages without harming the story’s beating heart.
Ponasik credits Jason Powell for his adaptation of Dvořák. “He comes from outside the opera world—he looked at it and started from scratch. This serves to connect with an audience whose natural habitat is not opera.”
In Rusalka the water nymph falls in love with a Prince after he swims in her lake. When she informs her father that she wants to be human, to become the Prince’s lover, he tells her it’s a terrible idea, but faced with her persistence, sends her into a dangerously enchanted forest to see the sorceress Jezibaba. She holds the power to transform Rusalka. The opera’s libretto draws from a Slavic fairytale and like many such tales, the message is: be careful of what you wish for. “Rusalka’s wish is tainted from the beginning,” Ponasik says. “She gets legs, loses her voice and gains a dark presence—a personality change.”
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Jezibaba isn’t depicted as simply demonic but complicated, ambiguous. “Jezibaba has the moral to the story and shares it: Rusalka is an example of what not to do. Jezibaba is the one who says, ‘I’ll do it but …”
The Moon is referenced throughout the opera’s libretto and is embodied in this production by Jason Powell, dressed in white and serving as the story’s narrator. The operatic passages are sung in the original Czech, but narrations and dialogue are in English.
Danceworks’ Christal Wagner choreographed the production’s six dancers whose motion is integral to telling the story alongside the eight singers-actors. Why remake Rusalka after the 2023 MOT-Danceworks coproduction? “We are taking the frame we made and reapproaching it with more energy, imagination and passion,” Ponasik says. “The number one thing is the joy the cast brings to it. We asked every performer what their goal was and crafted the performances around achieving it.”
Milwaukee Opera Theatre and Danceworks Performance MKE perform Rusalka Feb. 14-16 and Feb. 21-23 at Danceworks Studio Theatre, 1661 N. Water St. For tickets and more information, visit milwaukeeoperatheatre.org.
