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Stage director

Victoria Stevens

Artist

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Victoria Stevens is known for her inventive stagings that place a contemporary reading of the text and intense physical engagement at the forefront. She directed the world premiere of the contemporary opera Nero Monologues for London's inaugural Opera in the City Festival and made her Italian directing debut with Le nozze di Figaro at the New Generation Festival in Florence. For her production concept The Turn of the Screw (Britten), she was awarded 2nd prize at Opera Europa/Camerata Nuova’s biennial

 European Opera Directing Competition at the Royal Danish Opera. A directing contract with the Staatsoper Hannover followed, where she premiered Philip Glass’s The Fall of the House of Usher in 2022.

For the main stage of the Nationaltheater Mannheim, Victoria has directed new productions of Händel's Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno,  A Christmas Carol and Hänsel und Gretel, the latter as part of the White-Wall-Opera series, a socially-distanced performance solution to the COVID pandemic. A passion for devised physical theatre and the fusion of opera with mixed media established itself in early work. Victoria is a strong proponent of socially-engaged theatre as artistic activism, as epitomized in her recent staging of Jonathan Dove's The Monster in the Maze for the Theater Heidelberg-- a participatory opera for near 200 children, teenagers, opera chorus and operatic soloists on the theme of war and migration. In association with the European Network of Opera Academies (ENOA) and the Festival d'Aix en Provence, she was Director-In-Residence for projects at the Operosa Festival in Belgrade  (Mozartian Scenes & Recitativi) and the Opera Forward Festival at the Dutch National Opera (Participatory Opera Projects).
As an assistant director, Victoria has worked with the Arena di Verona, Teatro Regio di Parma, Teatro Verdi di Salerno, Lyrische Opernstudio Weimar, the Trentino Music Festival, Oberlin in Italy and the Dutch National Opera. Salient artistic impulses were gained in particular through her work with directors William Kentridge, Calixto Bieito, Barbora Horakova and Barrie Kosky. Victoria is a Staff Director at the Nationaltheater Mannheim, where she has revived productions of La Bohème, Il trovatore, Norma and Eugene Onegin.
Victoria was born in Cape Town, South Africa. She has a Masters Degree in Stage Direction and Dramaturgy from the Verona Accademia per l'opera Italiana, where she studied under Rossini specialist Pier Luigi Pizzi, Gianfranco de Bosio and Cecilia Gasdia. She has a Masters in Opera Performance from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's Alexander Gibson International Opera School, where she was the ABRSM Scholar, and a Bachelor of Western Classical Music (Hons) from the University of Cape Town. She has performed as a soprano with Cape Town Opera, the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, Oxford Lieder Festival, Schleswig-Holstein Musikfestival and the Richard Wagner Society of South Africa. Her training and instinct as a singer inform her directing voice and facilitate an immersive approach to working with singing actors. A determination to bring diverse female stories to the fore of the operatic canon is often central to her conception of work.

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