Im Ring mit Rossini - Deutsche Oper Berlin
In the ring with Rossini
After two productions as director and 21 appearances as a singer, Rolando Villazón returns to the Deutsche Oper Berlin to stage Rossini’s L’ITALIANA IN ALGERI – as a Mexican wrestling bout
At first glance Rossini’s L’ITALIANA IN ALGERI is an entertaining romp: Isabella, a beautiful Italian woman, is taken prisoner in Algiers while searching for her lover and deploys brains and cunning to regain her freedom and her loved one. For all its wit and humour, however, the work has a thick strand of xenophobia running through it. In Rossini’s day it was quite normal to paint Arabs as »baddies« and Italians as »goodies« and to do so with zero subtlety. That kind of treatment doesn’t get a free pass nowadays; the racism inherent to the opera is inacceptable and cannot be glossed over, so directors have two options: either they keep it as a period piece in its historical context, or they jerk it into a modern context and come up with a way to subvert the stereotype.
Our production eschews both Algeria and Italy as backdrops, setting the action in an unnamed location in Latin America which boasts two Lucha Libre studios. Lucha Libre is Mexican-style wrestling and very different to the US version. It’s a grassroots sport, developed and honed by craftsmen and skilled tradesmen who live alternative lives on the weekends: they don masks, squeeze into costumes, cultivate a dishevelled look. Lucha Libre is brash, colourful, bursting with symbolism and theatricality – and deeply rooted in Mexican culture. American wrestling is encapsulated in a few sentences, whereas descriptions of Lucha Libre – its philosophy, its performative nature, its portrayal in art, its sporty side - fill entire libraries. It has a depth and fanaticism that is alien to US wrestling.
Our production presents a typical conflict involving divergent economic interests and different personality types. A small studio is fighting to survive while a major studio tries to crowd it out of the market, which is where we take up the story: in our version, for instance, the opera’s Bey of Algiers is a former wrestler called El Bey, the authoritarian boss of the larger studio, El Seraglio Gym. Isabella heads the smaller studio, Avenida Italias Gym.
Lucha Libre is at once theatre, bodies, gestures and collective emotion – precisely what opera is. Both genres require great physical awareness and involve considerable risk. And both feature humour, theatricality and exaggerated feelings. Things that actually seem ridiculous are lapped up by audiences.
Humour opens up perspectives and invites us to view things with fresh eyes, open our minds and accept life in all its facets, in all its tragedy, comedy and beauty. Humour is an approach to life that provides the bridge between Rossini’s L’ITALIANA IN ALGERI and Lucha Libre.
Source: Ixtzel Arreola and Tino Hanekamp. Arreola is a midwife, healer and author living in Chiapas, Mexico. Hanekamp is an author and likewise a resident of Chiapas, Mexico.
