Setting A Baroque Tone

Set designer Gerard Gauci paints the mood for Opera Atelier

In a world that has so completely embraced "high" technology, fast food and artificial everything, it's nice to know that a few people are still trained in the long-established crafts to produce original creations by hand. One of the pleasures of Toronto's Baroque opera company, Opera Atelier, is their devotion to period production values - in dance, decor and music.
The company isn't strictly bound by the quest for authenticity, however. "There's a kind of common misconception with Opera Atelier that we recreate 18th-century opera," says set designer Gerard Gauci. "I would never reproduce an 18th-century set. Both myself and the costume designer, Dora Rust-D'Eye, create original designs inspired by 18th-century sources."
One of the Baroque attributes that Gauci does adhere to is the use of paint to create his effects. "These are very painted sets," he says. "My background as a painter and as an illustrator lends itself well to this."
(Gauci's illustration is familiar to many people through such work as his series of Canadian stamps commemorating this country's public gardens, and posters for performing arts companies and events like the Canadian Opera Company, the Royal Winter Fair and the National Ballet. (Possibly his best-known image would be his Adam and Eve poster for the Toronto International Film Festival a few years ago.)
The shallow Baroque stage demanded that the designer trick the audience into imagining huge spaces by the use of forced perspective, Gauci explains. Layers of standing canvas "flats" and hanging "drops" gave an impression of depth and distance, especially when the designer made the scale of each one progressively smaller the further it was from the audience.
Although the painted set was a staple of European and North American theatre until the Second World War, it is now a vanishing art. "There are less and less people who could paint that way," comments Gauci. "When we were very young I physically painted all those sets. Now I have a team of studio painters; it's called Scenic Drop Studios. They are very highly skilled scenic painters; it's taken us years to find painters like that."
Gauci still keeps his hand in, though. First of all, he actually produces detailed working drawings of each set in the scale of one-half inch to a foot, from which the studio painters will render 48 by 25-foot drops. Also, "I will do props," he says. For example, in Opera Atelier's upcoming production of Mozart's The Magic Flute "I've done very small things; for example, Zarastro's jewellery. Also, I'm really pushing the whole Masonic angle of the show, so I'm working on the 'embroidered' banners."
From show to show Gauci retains certain set pieces, like all-purpose natural or architectural elements. "These pieces are so beautifully done, it's a shame to go to all that trouble and then throw them away," he says. "And we are the only company doing this."

Opera Atelier's The Magic Flute runs at the Elgin Theatre, 189 Yonge St., from October 25 to November 4. For tickets call 416-872-5555 or visit www.ticketmaster.ca.

Publication Date: 2001-10-21
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