Going forward into the past.

Such is the demand for tickets for the Houston Grand Opera (HGO) production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas that opens February 2 that two extra performances have had to be added. This raises the question as to why a seventeenth-century English opera about the queen of Carthage who falls in love with a Trojan prince only to the from grief when he abandons her is attracting such popularity.

One explanation is that HGO audiences are going to be treated to a spectacle the likes of which they have never seen before. This Dido is a coproduction with Opera Atelier, a Toronto-based company that is beginning to attract international attention by bringing back to life the splendor of the baroque theatrical repertoire in productions that are as much a feast for the eyes as for the ears. Artistic directors Marshall Pynkoski and Jeannette Zingg are not dry scholars slavishly resurrecting works from historical sources; rather, the couple works in the spirit of the period, which gives Opera Atelier's productions their distinctive freshness, neither historical" nor "academic." Says stage director Pynkoski, "We recreate rather than reconstruct by using the aesthetic framework in which the piece first appeared as the jumping-off point to put together something new. For example, two baroque ballerinas, Camargo and Salle, performed the same works at the Paris Opera, but one was described as lyrical, the other as sensual. They didn't dance in the same way; each was a unique interpreter, and we see ourselves the same way. We're artists in our own right, creating our own style within the confines of a greater style."

"The baroque vocabulary should not be a straitjacket," adds choreographer Zingg, thirty-four. "For example, if I'm re-creating a ballet by John Weaver, I'll do massive research into his life and works. I'll listen to the music he used and try to envision what his ballet would have looked like if I were doing an academic reconstruction. Then I lay the research aside. It becomes my point of departure; I take the description of the piece and inform it with my own creativity. This `newness' is what makes our performances come alive for modern audiences. I want to shake off the image that Opera Atelier is an historical company, because we're people creating in the twentieth century. We're a modern company."

The Opera Atelier production of Dido will have international exposure; the opera has already been performed in Toronto as part of the company's home season, and after Houston will travel to London and Paris, thanks to the renowned French conductor Marc Minkowski who acted as godfather to the venture, so to speak. The maestro is director of the award-winning early music ensemble Les Musiciens du Louvre, the orchestra for Dido, and the founder of Le Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, a training school in French baroque repertoire.

Minkowski first worked with Opera Atelier when he was asked to conduct the company's 1992 period production of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. When HGO's general director, David Gockley, approached the maestro about conducting an early opera for his company, Minkowski suggested a coproduction with the Toronto group.

Says Minkowski, "It's rare to find in the same person the ability to be both a good director and a choreographer, yet understand the correct physical rhythm and sense of theater needed for the baroque period. Marshall and Jeannette have this true spirit of the baroque, which is why I decided to continue my relationship with them after Figaro and have brought them to France to do workshops for our students. They are able to join together the two universes of dancing and singing, which is the heart of baroque theater. Today, most people are interested in early operas only for the music and tend to ignore the dances.

"For example, Purcell noted in his score for Dido 'a dance in the Spanish style,' and Jeannette was able to create a piece where the dancers play castanets and cymbals exactly as in period paintings, which adds a richness to the production as a whole. I've noticed that when dance is included in early works, there generally is not the sense of the full body that is so important to Marshall and Jeannette, but just a concentration on the feet and arms. In France, where people are serious about the baroque era, the work of Opera Atelier might be considered too lively, but for this very reason, I'm impassioned about getting this company known internationally."

"Dance is our backbone," says Zingg. "Our productions are different from other staged early works because dance is an integral part; it's what gives our shows their look. The dancers work well with the singers because, in order to perform with us, the singers must also learn baroque stance and dramatic gestures. This total baroque movement aesthetic creates the beauty of the art form."

For dancer Barbara Szablowski, who spent nine years in the National Ballet of Canada, coming to Opera Atelier was finding both the old and the new. "The elements of ballet placement, beats, and positions are there in baroque dancing, but the key is restraint. You never lift your foot higher than a forty-five-degree angle, and the arms never move above the eyes or below the waist. Yet the sharp, quick footwork is extremely intricate, as is the repertoire of gestures.

"It took six months for me to absorb the style, and I got terrible cramps trying to position my thumb out and my middle finger sticking in. The posture was particularly frustrating because ballet had trained me to pull up my ribs and stomach; now I was sinking into my hips. At times remembering all the rules was like attempting to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time."

Mezzo-soprano Laura Pudwell, who performs several roles in Dido, has worked with Opera Atelier on many occasions. "The purpose of baroque gesture is to convey emotion without feeling emotion. The blocking is rigid, and the poses are from classical Greek statues, considered the ideal of beauty, especially the S curve, with the body weight resting on one foot, and the head, shoulder, and hip all in opposition. The gestures are exaggerated.

"When I first saw Jeannette in rehearsal, she was so beautiful that I was intimidated. How could I ever look like her with a singer's body? The technique Marshall used to help us learn the baroque aesthetic was to make us spend a lot of time in front of mirrors, placing our bodies and arms, trying to get our rib cages to move, standing on one foot and pointing the other. Then one day, I suddenly caught sight of myself in the mirror, and I thought, `I look beautiful!' When I'm in the costume and posture, I know I'm beautiful because I feel it. My hands fall naturally, as does my weight, and I'm comfortable with my body and in my body, even when I'm playing a man."

"The baroque period was a literal time," adds Pynkoski. "The characters were archetypes; things were black or white, and this simplicity gave the theater its power to stir the emotions. There was also an acceptance that the audience exists, and that what is onstage is staged. Today we never deal with the obvious. For example, the sorceresses in Dido are pure evil; there isn't any subtext. `Destruction is our delight!' they sing, and this means that we can go over the top in our portayal of the three witches even though the effect may seem outrageous to modern sensibilities."

Both Zingg and Pynkoski have a background in classical ballet and were drawn together by their love of the baroque period. Their first date was a concert by Tafelmusik, Toronto's acclaimed early music ensemble, which has since provided the orchestra for many Opera Atelier productions. They were married in 1980, and two years later they went to Paris and took jobs dancing at the Moulin Rouge in order to finance their research at Bibliotheque Nationale. They have also studied baroque dance and gesture with Dene Barnett, Wendy Hilton, Sandra Caverly, and Sandra Hammond.

The couple's first foray into performing was giving lecture-demonstrations in baroque style at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum. In 1985 their newly formed company, Opera Atelier, stunned Toronto audiences with a brilliant period production of Handel's The Choice of Hercules, and they have never looked back. Over the years, Opera Atelier has demonstrated an eclectic choice of repertoire covering a wide range of the baroque era: operas and opera ballets by Monteverdi, Charpentier, Rameau, and Lully, as well as a ballet by Weaver, a melodrame by Rousseau, and stylized classical theater by Racine. As recognition for their work, Pynkoski and Zingg were recipients of the 1993 Toronto Arts Foundation Award.

On the international front, Opera Atelier has been a big hit on television screens around the world with The Sorceress, a film of Handel arias and ballet suites woven into a story line starring prima donna Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music. For the last three years the company has received rave reviews at Stuttgart's Festival of Early Music, and in the fall of 1996 Pynkoski and Zingg will return to Paris to stage Mozart's Marriage of Figaro at the Opera-Comique with Minkowski. Even the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow has expressed interest in having the dancers and singers of Opera Atelier perform at that famed opera house.

Says Pynkoski, "I want Opera Atelier to become part of the fabric of mainstream theater. I want the glory of the baroque era to be rediscovered and offered back to the world." Zingg adds, "I'd like to be part of the mainstream, but not doing mainstream work that is predictable or blase. I'd like our company to be known for beautiful productions of unusual repertoire."

In fact, Opera Atelier would like to be regarded as a company that can mount period-sensitive productions from any era. Their wildly successful productions of Mozart's Magic Flute in 1991 and Marriage of Figaro the following year paved the way in opening up the company's repertoire beyond the baroque. "Mozart was a new departure for us," says Zingg, "and we can see ourselves in the future doing the ballets of Beethoven or the operas of Schubert, even a work from Diaghilev's Ballets Russes." And Pynkoski adds, "We don't want to be esoteric. If we're not popular, we're doing something wrong."