Houston's Weekend Planning Guide

Act III. Aeneas’s sailors bid farewell to their “nymphs on the shore” while the Sorceress and witches gloat over Dido’s now-certain doom. Encountering her lover one last time, the injured queen spurns his offer to stay and chooses a noble, if tragic, end: death from a broken heart. The opera ends with her iconic lament (“When I am laid in earth”) and a poignant chorus, which invites the cupids to “scatter roses on her tomb.”
On the staging and choreography
Of all the operas re-imagined for today’s audiences, performances of Dido and Aeneas may outnumber the rest. In addition to period instruments, our production employs period movement, dance, and staging. The costumes, however, are not what the audience would have seen in seventeenth-century England. Painters of this era such as Poussin, Bourdon and Lorain employed the classical style in ancient dress; but by contrast, typical opera costumes were still modeled after current fashions of Restoration England or the masquerade costumes of Inigo Jones, a popular theatrical designer of the previous age. Our production, which employs an ancient Roman look, features costumes from the stock of the New York Baroque Dance Company, many of which were designed by Marie Anne Chiment. The ancient garb reveals more of the body and its movements, especially in the dancing. We hope this nod to Antiquity brings our audience a deeper kinesthetic sympathy with the expression of the performers.

The choreography is based on English dances by contemporaneous choreographers whose works have come down to us through an abstract dance notation system developed at the court of Louis XIV. As adapted to Purcell’s music—which requires a rearrangement of dance phrases, creating canons and expanding beyond the single line in the dance score—the result is not the typical French use of space but rather a more expansive sailing through the air. The final dance is based on a minuet choreographed by Josiah Priest, the original choreographer of Dido and Aeneas. The character dances are my own creation in the Baroque style, following stage conventions of the time. The dancers of the New York Baroque Dance Company have been trained in Baroque ballet technique and in reading the period notation system, allowing them to more fully participate in the creative and interpretive process of this work. We are very pleased to be joining forces with Ars Lyrica Houston in bringing this masterpiece to life!

The Hobbby Center
Zilkha Hall
800 Bagby Street
Houston, TX 77002
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