Blood and Brains: 'Directing Salome'

For a month of bustling weekends in the hot Iowa summer, multiple operas play to sold-out crowds at the Blank Performing Arts Center at Simpson College. Performers sing mere inches from the first row of seats on this unusually intimate stage, and the space transforms rapidly from show to show. In a few hours, a forest becomes a Biblical court and a hotel room morphs into a dreamscape. This is the Des Moines Metro Opera festival, one of the best-regarded opera showcases in the country.

The DMMO’s 2024 lineup gives a taste of the company’s breadth and ambition: crowd favorite The Barber of Seville rubs shoulders with the world premiere of new opera American Apollo , while two great turn-of-the-century composers are put into conversation with each other through a fairytale production of Pelléas and Mélisande, the only opera by Claude Debussy, and a fierce version of Richard Strauss’ thorny classic Salome . With the festival underway, artists await their reviews, locals prepare their evening outfits and visiting opera specialists kill free time between shows in Des Moines. It was during this time that IPR spoke to Salome’s director, Alison Pogorelc , to learn more about the production and the craft of directing opera.

While DMMO is often praised for their grand, creative productions, this year's Salome is geared toward maximum emotional impact. There are no multimedia pyrotechnics or clever transpositions of the action onto new settings; it’s a no-frills production that goes right for the throat. “That’s the thing I get the most excited about, when you can see people so intensely connected on stage that the tension is palpable. It feels electric,” said Pogorelc.

Salome is often a shocking, controversial show — it includes stripping, incest and necrophilia, among other things — but Pogorelc’s approach was to bring out the material’s human element. “Dwelling on being provocative or not wasn’t really on my mind… I focused on getting the characters across,” she said. “If we can get the acting and the relationships on stage to match and build upon what the music is already setting up for us, it becomes an experience like nothing else... Only a form that is both musical and textual, whose vehicle is human relationships, and human voices can make you feel things in that special way that opera can, at its best.”

Pogorelc, who's received acclaim for directing Ariane and Bluebeard at Berkeley’s West Edge Opera, has a special history with Salome . It was the first opera she ever saw, when she was a kid attending Milwaukee’s Florentine Opera. In 2022, she received the Robert Tobin Director-Designer Prize for her concept for a modern take on the opera, though she had no idea that the chance to put her ideas in practice would come so soon. “I was extremely motivated by the idea of doing a Salome because it’s such a challenging piece,” she said. “As a director, I get really passionate about ideas, and Salome presents a lot of challenges and asks a lot of questions.”

The entire Des Moines Metro team, Pogorelc explained, was essential for responding to these challenges. The production features DMMO regular Sara Gartland ( A Thousand Acres , Queen of Spades ) as Salome and a powerhouse performance from Norman Garrett as Jochanaan (John the Baptist), whose booming voice beams out of a sweating, trembling body, cutting right through the extravagance and grotesque comedy of the court of King Herod (Chad Shelton) . The set, designed by Steven C. Kemp , features three large crumbling stones in the shape of a foot, a hand and a head, almost as if they broke off of the statues of a civilization of giants whose ruins the characters are living amongst. Pogorelc said the set and the music helped her “unlock” what she wanted to do with her staging. “[Sara Gartland and I] had the privilege of sitting down with [our conductor David Neely], and he talked through all the different musical motifs and what he thought they meant. He’s brilliant and understands this piece so well.” Her philosophy in general, she added, is that, “The staging is in the score; all you have to do is listen to the score… When you hear it you know what needs to happen.”

She gave the example of Salome and Jochanaan’s first meeting. Multiple times, the princess’ feelings towards the prophet swerve from desire to repulsion and back, while he repudiates her each time with a prophecy. Pogorelc’s staging uses a parallel between that scene and the opera’s climax, where Salome sings to Jochanaan’s decapitated head. “Salome is slowly making her way towards him from each of these giant body parts [of the set], from the foot to the hand to the head, ultimately, which is the thing she wants the most. I wanted her to snake her way around the space… That scene became fundamental to being able to figure out the rest of the opera, because then the final scene, which is the most famous in the opera, that scene became easy because it references some of the same musical phrases... It’s all about sense memory, it’s about her retracing her steps. The staging [became] in large part her making her way back around the way she came when she first saw him. Because the music was telling me that’s what the scene’s about. She’s going back to that memory and she’s reliving it with his head in her hands and showing him what she saw, making him see through her eyes.”

Pogorelc also wanted to emphasize the symbolic and philosophical layers of Salome . Her interpretation of the character steps away from the malicious seductress that audiences may be familiar with. “If you asked me what I think the piece is about, I would say it’s about feeling trapped in a world where you don’t belong and seeing a possibility for something else…[The world of Salome is] a material world of sensual pleasures, where there might be something spiritual, but the only way people can understand the spiritual is through the material, through what they can see or through items that they value… Then Jochanaan comes and he offers an immaterial idea of what it means to have a divine connection, to have faith and to be connected spiritually… Having been a product of this world that is so material, Salome doesn’t know how to interact with him or relate to him in any other way but through touch. And how could you expect someone who is of that world to know anything else?”

Pogorelc described her experience at DMMO in glowing terms, saying the intimacy of the festival and its artistic risks are what makes it stand out on the national level. “It’s so rare in this country to have an opera company that is willing to say to their audience — which is truly this heart of America audience, [full of] Iowans — we’re going to challenge you by giving you some of the hardest repertory to understand: poetically challenging, dramatically challenging, musically challenging… We’re going to set up a whole season of that. And then they sell out their seasons. This does not happen anywhere else,” she said. “I feel honored that I had the opportunity to direct a show here. I came to this company… because I knew the work they were doing was special, and I had to see it for myself.”

Performances of the 2024 Des Moines Metro Opera productions will be recorded for later broadcast on Iowa Public Radio. Follow ipr.org or your local IPR Classical station for more information.

Salome
Music by Richard Strauss
Libretto by Hedwig Lachmann after Oscar Wilde
Featuring Sara Gartland, Norman Garrett, and Chad Shelton
Conductor, David Neely
Director, Alison Pogorelc