BRIAN STAUFENBIEL
DIRECTOR
BIOGRAPHY
Brian Staufenbiel is the creative director for Opera Parallèle where he has directed and created the conceptual designs of the company’s productions since it was founded in 2010. Specializing in multimedia, immersive, and interdisciplinary productions, he actively works across a wide range of artistic disciplines collaborating in film, and with media designers, choreographers and dancers, circus artists, and designer fabricators. His progressive approach to stagecraft has garnered critical acclaim for many of the company’s productions, including Wozzeck, Orphée, Champion, and Dead Man Walking.
Staufenbiel recently directed films for the online festival season of the Sun Valley Music Festival, a film of Dove/Angelis’ Flight for Seattle Opera, an award-winning graphic novel film of Talbot/Scheer’s Everest with Opera Parallèle, and a feature-length film of Gordon Getty’s opera Goodbye Mr. Chips for Festival Napa Valley.
This season, Staufenbiel brings his production of The Shining to Atlanta Opera and his Das Rheingoldto Calgary Opera. Last season included new productions of Moravec and Campbell’s The Shining and a fully immersive experience of Talbot and Scheer’s Everest for Opera Parallèle, and Golijov’s Ainadamar for L’Opera de Montréal. Staufenbiel directed a new documentary about the life of Frederica Von Stade with Paper Wings Films and co-directed, with choreographer Yayoi Kambara, IKKAI, a dance installation about Japanese incarceration camps in the United States during World War II.
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CRITICAL ACCLAIM
"... magnificent..." – San Francisco Chronicle
La Belle et la Bête – “In Opera Parallèle’s magnificent new production, which opened an all-too-brief four-performance run at SFJazz on Thursday, July 14, director Brian Staufenbiel and a team of ingenious collaborators add layer upon layer to the original material until it sparkles and swirls like a disco ball. Wherever you look, wherever you listen, the result is an all-enveloping feast for ears and eyes alike."
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“... brilliant…” – Opera News
Elektra – “Stage director and production designer Brian Staufenbiel put Strauss’s opera in a new frame, creating a parallel story that overlaid the familiar opera version of the Greek tragedy. . . Among the brilliant strokes of this production …was putting the orchestra on stage… This new take on Elektra makes the characters less mythic and more human. It also adds occasional comic relief, in a tasteful way, and some useful onstage action in an opera that doesn't have much."
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"... riveting from beginning to the end…” – La Scena Musicale
Das Rheingold – “The first time Wagner’s Das Rheingold is staged in Montreal is a success. As a whole, this is Opéra de Montréal’s best production in the last two and a half years, riveting from beginning to the end.”
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"... an eloquent theatrical experience..." – LA Weekly
Usher House / The Canterville Ghost – “Collectively, L.A. Opera’s Off Grand presentation of Scare Pair, under the direction of Brian Staufenbiel, was an entertaining hybrid of spooky stories and opera, providing fans of scary stories with an eloquent theatrical experience and fans of opera with a particularly colorful program.”