Cuban stage and film director Luis Ernesto Doñas starts the new year a long way from home in Japan, staging Rossini’s opera Otello. The show will be the highlight of the Belcanto Opera Festival, promoted by the Fujiwara Opera and Valle d’Itria Music Festival.
Otello takes place on January 20 and 22 in the Teatro Giglio Showa in Kawasaki. An international cast including American tenor John Osborn as Otello, Spanish soprano Leonor Bonilla as Desdemona, and Italian American tenor Michele Angelini as Rodrigo, command the stage. Mexico’s Ivan Lopez Reynoso, Principal and Artistic Director of the Orchestra of Teatro Bellas Artes, conducts the Opera Band Orchestra.
The Artistic Director of the Belcanto Opera Festival in Japan, Carmen Santoro, invited Doñas after the success of his La Fille du Régiment at the Donizetti Opera Festival and Acquaprofonda, a contemporary opera co-produced by the Teatro dell Opera di Roma e Teatro Sociale di Como. This is the same team that takes on the creation of Otello with set designer Chiara La Ferlita, costume designer Elisa Cobello, and lighting designer Camilla Piccioni.
A graduate of the San Antonio de los Baños Film School in Cuba, Doñas has produced many short films and documentaries in Cuba and on the international stage.
At present, Doñas is in advanced development of his first feature film, Esencia Habana that won ICAIC’s Film Development Fund prize under the Opera Prima category.
In the operatic world, he has directed productions including Alcina, Rita, Enea in Caonia, La Fille du Regiment, and Acquaprofonda in some of the world’s most prestigious theatres such as Havana’s Gran Teatro de La Habana “Alicia Alonso,” Bergamo’s Teatro Donizetti, Teatro dell Opera di Roma, and Como’s Teatro Sociale, and others.
What do you find interesting about this production of Othello in Japan?
Creating our Otello has been an intense experience in terms of time and energy. Artists from different countries of the world have joined, enriching the work. Thanks to the discipline and rigor of the Japanese artistic-technical team, we have managed in a short time to outline characters with new shades and a different point of view towards history itself.
I was interested in investigating how the lust for power corrupts pure souls. The character of Jago, played by the Italian tenor Antonio Mandrillo, becomes more relevant since he is the one who knots and intertwines the relationships between the characters in the opera.
Special thanks to the Fujiwara Opera choir artists for their enthusiasm and attention to theatrical details.
How do you define yourself in terms of identity? This is always interesting when a Cuban artist becomes internationally acclaimed.
In terms of identity, it is easy to fall into empty cliches and grandiloquent phrases. I think that the ambiguity of the matter lies its essence. I feel it is something that grows in the distance and is a point of strength as an emigrant artist. The ability to find solutions to obstacles, being able to do a lot with little, understanding mixing and fusion as a fundamental element, and the awareness that in any process, the most important thing will always be the human factor. I think these are elements that characterize Cubans wherever they are. They define my creative processes. Above all, when the work is done collectively, I believe this Latin warmth emerges and spreads to ensure that we all navigate in the same direction.
Cast:
Otello by Gioachino Rossini
John Osborn (Otello)
Leonor Bonilla (Desdémona)
Michele Angelini (Rodrigo)
Antonio Mandrillo (Jago)
Toni Nezic (Elmiro)
Yasko Fujii (Emilia)
Yasushi Watanabe (Doge and gondoliere)
Kodai Nishiyama (Lucio)
T.K. Hernández is co-founder and editor at Cuba Business Report. Her work has been published in various online news media publications. She has supported fundraising for Cuba’s last two hurricane disaster relief campaigns and is a member of the Cuban Friendship Association. She is also a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, and ACES International alliance of editors. Ms. Hernández is the author of three books, most recently, “The Cuba Interviews: Conversations on Foreign Investment and Economic Development,” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
