Dido and Aeneas

 

Our production of Dido and Aeneas will take the form of an opera-film with parallel audio and visual narratives. The music, recorded by talented singers and instrumentalists trained in baroque style, will follow the opera’s original libretto. The visual component will tell an analogous story, centering on the Chinese actress Shangguan Yunzhu and her alleged affair with Mao Zedong before the country’s Cultural Revolution. We hope to highlight the ways in which dramatic tropes and archetypes of the Western canon are, in fact, present all over the world, and to expand the relevance of this European story to a wider variety of cultures and peoples.