Aussie ballet boy turns opera buff

Moving from one art form to another is a difficult career move that only a few can achieve.

It demands transferable skills as well as lateral thinking and a tendency to move fast and forward.

Luckily for Shane Placentino, the revival director of three Opera Australia productions this year, he has those premise covered and then some.

Born and raised in Adelaide, Placentino danced with the Australian Ballet for a decade, reaching the level of lead soloist before performing with the Sydney Dance Company for six years under the artistic direction of Graeme Murphy and creative collaborator Janet Vernon. Arrive.

Then, in his mid-30s, he suffered a lower back injury.

"Graeme had all the choreography for the partnership: lift, twist, push!" Placentino, 49, says with a general laugh on Zoom during a rehearsal for Murphy's production Turandot, which opens January 12.

"So my back started to give way. But given that I graduated from Australian Ballet School at age 19 and joined Australian Ballet at age 20, a dance career spanned 36 Arriving is truly phenomenal and something I am grateful for."

Nevertheless, it was a setback at the time.

"Janet Vernon always told me, as a dancer you die twice, and I definitely went through a period of mourning when I stopped dancing," Placentino says.

He soon served as a stage manager and rehearsal director for the Sydney Dance Company's new artistic director, Raphael Bonachella, who was appointed in 2007 after Murphy and Vernon left.

"But I still didn't know what I wanted to do."

In late 2007 he received a call from Murphy, asking him if he wanted to be assistant director on his new production of Aida for Opera Australia, although Placentino is polite enough to state that Murphy has previously asked someone else. Was.

"I didn't know what I was doing," he says, laughing again.

"I was learning it all on the job, really, but we premiered Aida in Perth in 2008 and I didn't spoil it. Then we did it in Sydney and Melbourne and I put it in Adelaide and Brisbane for Graeme. "

After directing revivals of the opera in Sydney and Melbourne in 2012–13, Placentino moved back to Adelaide to teach contemporary dance.

Then in 2015, Opera Australia contacted again to say that they would stage a production of Scottish opera director David McVicker's Gonod's Faust and were looking for an assistant director and an assistant choreographer.

Given his experience and skill set, Placentino was able to fulfill both roles.

"Three years after that, Graeme and Janet asked me to be assistant director and choreographer on their new production of Franz Lehr's The Merry Widow."

It was as if the universe - and Opera Australia - was trying to tell him something.

"I just thought, I really need to get over this," he says.

"So in 2018 I told Opera Australia's artistic director Lyndon Terracini that I was going to go back to Sydney and if there was any other work, I would be available. And it all went from there."

He has since been assistant choreographer/director in the 2019 production of Opera Australia's West Side Story on Sydney Harbor, assistant director in the 2019 production of Murphy and Vernon's Madama Butterfly (which he will direct a mid-2022 revival in Sydney) and has directed the revivals of Faust and The Merry Widow (2019-21).

Placentino was also the revival director and choreographer of Italian director David Livermore's production of Aida in Melbourne and Sydney in 2021, although the latter season was only a one-night affair due to COVID.

"It's been a huge learning curve, but I'm now at a point where I'm as comfortable being an assistant or revival director as I am doing choreography."

More than anything, he is grateful to Murphy and Vernon for the support and opportunities they have provided.

Placentino says, “I first worked with Graeme in 1994, when Australian Ballet premiered his production of The Nutcracker, so we have a long-established relationship and we decided to join the Sydney Dance Company. determined to do so."

"I cannot stress enough how much of an influence and mentor Graeme has been to me."

Murphy says he trusts Placentino because of their long-established connection.

“Shane understands our ways and has a lot of runs on the board in terms of seeing and passing on information as a recipient of my direction, as a dancer and as an assistant director and revival director.

“Importantly, he has the ability to handle an opera chorus, which is the biggest machine on earth, in fact—a many-headed monster,” laughs Murphy.

"And they trust him and love working with him."

Placentino is currently rehearsing for Puccini's Turandot at the Opera Center in Surry Hills, Sydney.

"In this opera, especially in Act 1, Graeme has the chorus going on about nonstop," he says.

"They're like a Greek chorus in that they're always on stage, commenting on the position they're in. They do this through text—what they sing—but not through the way they act and Let's move on. So I'm treating the chorus like a chorus de ballet."

As revival director, Placentino's job is to stand in for the original director and choreographer – Murphy in Turandot's case – working alongside the cast and conductor to ensure the integrity and consistency of the vision.

"I've been thinking about how a character in a story needs to move from here to there and the emotion that needs to be displayed through movements, facial expressions, and gestures," he says.

"Just as singers are trying to project their voice to the back of the theater, I'm trying to do it with movement and gesture without looking fanciful or frivolous."

Until recently, Placentino turned to directing in a fairly visual way.

"That's because, as a dancer, you listen to the music — the score — and remember the movement. I don't remember ever looking at the score to remember a ballet," he says.

"But in the opera world, that's how they grow up. They open a score and sing the libretto. So I'm trying to focus more on the text because that's how you connect and communicate with the singers, who are not necessarily trained in movement."

One of the singers he will lead at his own pace this year is German superstar Jonas Kaufmann, one of the world's most sought-after tenors, who will be singing Lohengrin in Melbourne from May 14-24.

“When I found out just before Christmas that we had secured Kaufman, I was excited, scared, nervous and thrown all at the same time,” smiles Placentino.

A co-production between Opera Australia and the Théâtre Royal de la Monnie in Brussels, Wagner's romantic reimagining of the medieval legend is directed by the French director, writer and actor Olivier Pie, who founded the opera in Berlin after World War II. Is.

"This is my first time directing a revival of Lohengrin, or really any German opera, so I'm a novice in some ways but I just have to work hard and make sure I know it from back to front. "

It's not far from suburban Adelaide in the 1970s, when a six-year-old Placentino and a younger brother watched three little girls from across the street perform ballet in a studio set up in their garage.

"My brother was soon ordered to join them," he recalls.

"After the break, I would go and look at them and then one day their teacher saw that I was sitting down, still I was moving, and said, 'Why don't you get up and do this?'

"Being the elder brother, I had a huge ego and I thought, 'whatever he can do, I can do'.

"So there I was, dancing with my brother for a while, until he gave up and started playing football, and I just kept going."

He's never really stopped.

These days, Placentino has the cream of the opera world airing him on a daily basis.

"I feel so lucky. I've got the best job in the world because I'm in the studio and I listen to them every day. You can't buy that experience. So I just love it."