François Racine: A passion for acting in opera

Advertisement / Publicité

This page is also available in / Cette page est également disponible en: Francais (French)

Canadian stage director François Racine has built his career in opera, a niche he enjoys for the specific challenge it presents. “I’m doing opera because I can deal with (its) restrictions and rituals. I find a sort of freedom in those rituals, and whatever guidelines are in the score,” he says. The prescriptive nature of opera is even more evident with composers like Giacomo Puccini who famously included stage directions and whose music often references specific objects or actions. Racine will get to navigate these challenges again when he directs Opera de Montréal’s production of La bohème this spring.

“You can’t really go around the fact that this is the ‘lighting of the oven music. This is the door’,” says Racine, who adds: “I always like doing Puccini because the singers are busy. It’s in the music: they have to turn around … open the door, put the coat down … Act 1 and 4 are so busy for the principals … They are doing real stuff. So the acting becomes very natural.”

In contrast, Racine sees Act 3 as a place where “the bodies are floating in space” and “it’s all about that moment of emotion” with voices at the forefront. “You get the best of two worlds in this opera. Not too much of one, not too much of the other.”

Racine Racine has closely studied the specific challenges of acting for opera singers. It was the subject of his master’s degree and he subsequently taught classes at McGill and now at Université de Montréal. “My first question is: ‘Do you technically master this piece? Are you totally confident? You know what you’re talking about?’ Then, once the basics are there, we can start talking about acting,” Racine says.

“There’s something about acting for singers that is very close to what athletes have to achieve. For me, an Olympic athlete goes through the same mental questioning as a singer.” For Racine, it’s about the singer’s expressive potential and how to convey that with “the voice—how to get the body to be fluid and expressive and natural and simple—not to go into method acting, (but) finding various routes because for every person it’s different.”

A mainstay of many opera directors’ activities is to work within the context of older, existing productions. Racine has a long history with Canadian Opera Company’s award-winning Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung, first staged for the company by Robert Lepage in 1993. Then, Racine was the assistant, but in subsequent decades he has staged the iconic show all around the world. He will do so again in April 2026, when the COC embarks on its latest revival. “For me, it is one of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life,” says Racine. “I don’t get bored of it because, well, the staging is done. But then, the most important part is to do the acting. And that’s where I have full liberty. Once I’ve convinced (singers) to roll on that floor, to go into the water … then we can start working on the acting. It’s very intense!”