<Begin Segment 35>

SY: When you were working at the university, you were the opera theater choreographer, and you had produced many operas. But how was choreographing for the opera theater different from choreographing your own dance company?

MN: Well, in the first place, when somebody does a set and somebody does the costume and somebody does the music and somebody does the singing, and this necessary evil called dance has to be put in here and there in most of the operas that I worked in. But there are operas that have dance scenes in them. Especially just for dance. So, but, well, like for instance, Hansel and Gretel has the gingerbread children, (...) and so I got to take a lot of my kids over there. And they had to learn to sing with their eyes closed and dance.

SY: Why with their eyes closed?

MN: Because the gingerbread children, their eyes were closed.

SY: Is that something that you actually put in the choreography?

MN: No. That's in the libretto that gingerbread (children's) eyes are closed. And they don't get to open their eyes until the witch gets burned (in the furnace). And then they all come to life and they open their eyes. [Laughs] But there were two operas, Gluck's Orpheus has only three characters in it and everything else is (danced), a chorus of mourners, and the happy spirits in the Elysian fields, and the furies at the gates of hell, and then at a finale was the, kind of (court) dance. And the person who did the sets, he was all for putting a, maybe three or four flights of stairs and five columns. [I said], "It's no place to dance. (...) Gee, can't you take some of those stairs out?" I said, "A couple of my dancers are pregnant, and I don't want them to..." Sometimes they would adjust. And then the (man) that did the costumes, he was all set to do great costumes. So we had panniers. They looked like life preservers around our waist, and then three or four different skirts and little wings on our back (and wigs). And you couldn't move, you couldn't dance. (...) You could move your arms without the body. And one of the directors was very anti-barefoot, so (...) we always had to wear shoes which we weren't used to. And one time we tied blue ribbons around our big toe and then up around our ankle, and that was supposed to be a shoe. So then (...) once in a while, like in the Marriage of Figaro and Cosi Fan Tutti, they needed little kids to fill in here and there so then (I) got to use them. And then in Gluck's Orpheus, I got to wear a platinum blond wig like Marie Antoinette. I looked pretty good.

SY: So you finally got your wish to become blond? [Laughs]

MN: (Yes). I was strawberry blond.

<End Segment 35> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.