Floodlights blazed from the side of the stage, blinding the audience as a troupe of paparazzi descended from the rear of the theater, flashing cameras and phony smiles, engulfing everyone present in the maelstrom of media attention that Dido would soon face.
The cameras and in-your-face MTV-style journalism were an integral part of the UB Opera Workshop's two nearly sold-out presentations of "Dido and Aeneas" last weekend in the Drama Theater at the Center for Arts.
Henry Purcell's opera, based on the Virgil's classic drama "Aeneid," originally featured Dido, played by graduate vocal performance student Carolyn Unitas Roos, as the queen of Carthage. UB's post-modern production casts Dido instead as a movie star diva, hounded by a relentless chorus of paparazzi.
This highly erotic psycho-opera highlights the plight of the larger-than-life star as she searches for love and reaches past her insecurities to trust her new-found beau, Aeneas. Just as things are going smoothly for the two lovers, Aeneas is called to Italy to fulfill his destiny as founder of Rome. Dido, fearing she has been abandoned, takes her own life in an ambiguous yet poignant climax.
To intensify the invasive media tactics plaguing Dido's life, Artistic Director Dora Ohrenstein also included approximately 20 television monitors, airing select scenes from the stage on their screens simultaneously, as fixtures in the audience.
The TV sets were intended to display the complexities of the characters' personalities, but often distracted the audience from the live action and, due to unsteady camera work, left some audience members feeling queasy.
In the original myth, Dido curses Aeneas and stabs herself atop a funeral pyre before lighting herself aflame, burning her body, and her kingdom with it, to the ground. Ohrenstein, though, depicted Dido's suicide without leveling the UB kingdom.
Three witches, representing Dido's sexual repression, wrapped her in a black cloth, bound her in a fashion reminiscent of ancient Egyptian mummies, and laid her on a couch as she uttered her final words, "Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate."
As the four female figures lay together on the deathbed, rose petals fell from above. Their brilliant purple costumes blazed a lasting image into the minds of the audience, and the only sound at the close of the scene was the sniffling from the paparazzi on stage.
According to Roos, Ohrenstein chose to leave Dido's death ambiguous to leave a more conceptual meaning for the audience to decipher.
Stacey Kurtz, a senior illustration major, felt Dido's suicide was the most moving part of the opera.
"As a solid picture compositionally, artistically, and theatrically, it was simply powerful," Kurtz said.
Purcell's opera pulled as much response from Friday night's audience as it did over 300 years ago. However, this was due largely to the visuals included in the performance. Lyrics were at times hard to hear or understand, but the visuals carried the meaning across these gaps.
Computer Art Junior Ryan Etipio said the ideas intended for the modernization of the opera were fantastic, "but in some cases those ideas didn't seem to be conveyed to the audience the way they were intended."
Some of the play's more subtle points, such as the witches' representation of Dido's repressed sexuality, were overshadowed by the play's visuals and drama. Their beautiful and ornate costumes were merely trappings for the hidden treasure of the play's deep-seated emotional messages.
