Senior Lydia Steier to Direct Purcell's Baroque Masterpiece Dido and Aeneas to be performed Friday and Saturday, May 19 and 20, 8 P.M., in Warner Main Space By Rhiannon Giddens
	RELATED About the Opera and Cast		In Rehearsal with Joseph Greaves ('02), Lydia Steier ('00), and Alyson Cambridge ('01) Oberlin Conservatory, in association with the Oberlin Student Theater Association, will present Purcell's masterpiece Dido and Aeneas on Friday and Saturday, May 19 and 20, 8 p.m., in Warner Mainspace. The three-act opera will be directed by double degree senior (vocal performance/ independent opera directing) Lydia Steier ('00). Michael Sponseller (AD'00) will serve as music director. The performances will be performed in English and will be accompanied by period orchestra. Dido and Aeneas is Lydia Steier's finale to what has shown to be a long and varied directing career here at Oberlin. In less than two years she has directed scenes for the opera theater classes, her own evening of baroque opera scenes, and a full-length opera, The Medium, and has, incidentally, managed to prepare her double major in four years. Lydia Steier - A Different Kind of Conservatory Voice Major - the Directing Kind Lydia Steier is an unusual voice major: she would much rather work behind the stage than on it. Her passion for giving orders surfaced at age seven or eight, when she made her friends perform the opera vignettes from the then-popular movie "Amadeus"- at least until the advent of 'Nintendo' stole them all away. Her next directing effort was realized at the age of 14, when she participated in the Hartt School's summer program of opera scenes as a performer, but ended up telling people what to do anyway. "I would rather run the discourse," she says, "then participate in it." Her interest in directing lapsed for a time, and after running the gamut of high-school musicals, she arrived at Oberlin as a voice major. But, she found something lacking with traditional studies, "I found that the entire way of life for a traditional voice major was just not something I could reconcile. I got frustrated with it, and started taking drama classes and harpsichord lessons." When the keyboard department traveled to France during the Winter Term of her sophomore year, she went with it. In the tiny Versailles opera house she had a revelation, "I could feel the stage and the mechanisms under it; the ancientness of this house, and I thought about what singers have to deal with: the fusion of honoring tradition and enticing new audiences. I realized that I wanted to dedicate my life to serving as a bridge between them." Dido cast members Joseph Greaves '02 (Aeneas) and Alyson Cambridge '01 (Dido) After returning from France, she made a beeline for the Oberlin Opera Theater director's office and announced that she wanted a new major. With the help of Jonathon Field, director of Opera Theater, she assembled a course of study that fit departmental requirements, then submitted the major. After a short time, the first undergraduate Opera Directing major in Oberlin was approved and she was on her way. The first opera scene she directed in Oberlin was the Don Giovanni sextet; in style, it is a precursor to her current work of Dido and Aeneas. "I incorporated gesture manuals and floor patterns, but minimalized and angularized them; with the sparse and simple costumes, I was after a mechanized trance-like effect." One of her major directing ideas is that of a huge divide between audience and performers. Rather than pull the audience in to live the character's lives with them, she strives to create an emotional distance while evoking certain moods with gesture and tableaux. Along with her initial forays into directing and a heavy class load, she still performed. She played a major role in the Theater and Dance's 1998 fall production of "Kindertransport" and was nominated for a very prestigious collegiate acting award, the Irene Ryan. She was unable to go to the finals because she was putting up her first full-length production, Gian-Carlos Menotti's The Medium in Finney Chapel. Since this was a Winter Term production, the entire opera, from first rehearsal to final performance, went up in a little over three weeks. For this production she settled on traditional staging, but with a twist. The three main characters were presented in a realistic way, to contrast with the outright characterizations of the three subordinate characters. This created scenes of heightened realism alternated with outright farce. It resulted in an emotionally tight piece. Director Lydia Steier ('00) with Alyson Cambridge ('01) Steier's next big project was Scorn: An evening of Baroque Opera Scenes on the Subject of the Scorned Woman. Big title, big triumph. She submitted the program for inclusion into the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Toronto, and was invited. So the whole cast and production will travel to Toronto in November 2000. She continued to direct individual opera scenes, but The Medium had prepared her for her full length production- Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, this time complete with production staff, set, lighting, publicity, and a semester's worth of preparation. Also of note: Steier was the youngest finalist for the Cincinnati College-Conservatory's prestigious directing program, and is currently trying to choose where she wants to go for school next year.
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