Arias and aerials
Director’s operatic vision takes wing with ropes and silks
Sophia Santulli was happily pursuing a varied career as a singer in 2015 — some opera, some metal, some original compositions — when it occurred to her what was missing.
“I had a flash of brilliance,” the Oakland mezzo-soprano said. “I realized I wanted to start training as an aerialist so I could sing in the air someday.”
Within two years, Santulli had made good on that resolution, acquiring enough skills with ropes and aerial silks to do five-minute routines of soaring vocalism. But her ambitions were greater than that.
Now Santulli is preparing to unveil a full-scale incarnation of her plans: a staging of Pietro Mascagni’s one-act opera “Cavalleria Rusticana” at Dance Mission Theater this weekend, with aerial interludes fully integrated into the production.
The production of this fiery Sicilian melodrama, put on under the umbrella of the nationwide organization Opera on Tap, features a cast of local opera singers. Mountain View soprano Yuji Bae appears as the lovelorn Santuzza, and Sacramento tenor Salvatore Atti sings Turiddu, the headstrong young Sicilian villager at the fulcrum of the opera’s romantic geometry.
But in addition to the usual operatic trappings, Santulli — who directs as well as appearing in the production as the seductive Lola — weaves aerial arts into the performance at junctures that are designed to illuminate the dramatic structure of the piece.
“For Lola, there’s only one point where aerial would fit into the plot, and that’s the tavern scene,” she said. “The whole opera takes place in just one day, which means there’s a lot of other days that the audience has missed — including the love affair between Turiddu and Lola.
“So after they’ve been drinking, Lola goes up on the silks, and I’ve created a very short spinning routine. The idea is that even with one or two drinks, we can just really spin in a tizzy into our more hedonistic selves.”
The production includes two more expansive solo turns by the Oakland aerial artist Nina Sawant — one for the prelude, and another for Mascagni’s famous orchestral interlude at the opera’s midpoint.
Sawant has worked extensively in theater and dance as well as circus, but she says she’s excited to be performing in an operatic context for the first time. She says she received clear direction from Santulli on her visions for the two scenes, then went off to her loft to create routines that reflected that.
“My role as the aerial silks performer is to match the mood of the story in that moment,” she said, “and also to be a visual illustration of what’s happening in the music.”
It’s an assignment calling for a different kind of choreography than in a more traditional circus setting.
“In my first circus training, there was an emphasis on building the structure of an act, finding movements that were thrilling and unique, with big feats of athleticism,” Sawant explained. “But the Intermezzo in ‘Cavalleria,’ for example, doesn’t call for huge drops that make the audience catch their breath. It’s much more lyrical, focused on the mood and the music.”
An aerial interlude in an opera
might seem surprising at first glance, but from one perspective it’s not all that different from more traditional uses of movement — or even less traditional ones. The San Francisco Opera’s powerful production of Gluck’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” in November, for instance, drew on countertenor Jakub Józef Orlinski’s skills as a breakdancer.
“Any time there’s dance, the real question is whether it makes sense right there,” said conductor Paul Schrage, who is the music director for this production of “Cavalleria.” “I consider the Intermezzo as a perfect place for dance — you could have had ballet, you could have had pantomime, or you could have aerialism.”
Santulli, who studied voice at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, has clearly given a lot of thought to the potential uses of aerialism as a theatrical resource. Her first effort along these lines was a 2018 adaptation of Bizet’s “Carmen,” with herself in the title role, which opened her eyes to the possibilities.
“In the scene where Carmen is arrested, for instance, and is trying to convince Don José to set her free, there was a rope artist creating this tension between freed and bound, mirrored by my wrists and the struggle I was going through. So we had that approach where the musical metaphor and the thematic metaphor were brought out by the aerialists,” Santulli said.
A double bill combining the “Carmen” adaptation with Ravel’s fantastical one-act opera “L’enfant et les sortilèges” (“The Child and the Magic Spells”) took the stage in March 2020, wrapping up days before San Francisco was shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic.
And there are more possibilities still to explore. Santulli says she has her eye on the 2007 operatic adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland” by the Korean composer Unsuk Chin, and also on Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci,” which is traditionally paired with “Cavalleria.”
“But I don’t think this could just be done with any opera,” she said. “When we chose ‘Cavalleria,’ I had to think about how aerial was going to be underpinning or buoying the opera instead of decorating it or distracting from it.
“I don’t want this to just be a spectacle. Although of course, opera itself is meant to be a spectacle in some ways, so I don’t think it’s gratuitous.”