
Barbara de Limburg
Designer
The excellent scenery of Barbara de Limburg metamorphoses naturally, enlarging or dwarfing the stage, never betraying the original dramaturgy and providing in Ford's house spaces at different levels, hiding enough for them to manoeuvre one another. In the final scene, the forest as such does not exist, but lights and shadows frame the entanglement. What was already anticipated in the second act becomes starkly evident when a reflective wall shows fleetingly to the spectators in their seats: we are all deceived.
We are witnessing stupendously effective stage design - a scenic work as cunning as it is clever, where the fairytale becomes modern and the irony is clear behind the amusement on the surface.
Barbara de Limburg designs for both theatre and opera, creating sets with great style, imagination and visual beauty. Born in Brussels, she studied set design at La Cambre, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels, graduating in 1996. Initially, she worked mainly in theatre and in dance before expanding into opera.
Barbara enjoys a collaboration with director Laurent Pelly; current and recent projects include Offenbach’s Le Voyage dans la Lune for L’Opéra Comique in Paris, Falstaff for Teatro Real Madrid,/La Monnaie/de Munt,/Opéra national de Bordeaux,/Nikikai Opera Foundation, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’Or for La Monnaie/de Munt/Teatro Real Madrid/Opéra national de Lorraine, also winner of the Prix de l'Europe Francophone awarded by L’Association Professionnelle de la Critique, and Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénedict and Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges for the Glyndebourne Festival.
Collaborations with other directors include Idomeneno with Christophe Gayral for Opéra national du Rhin and La traviata and Hänsel und Gretel for Angers Nantes Opéra with Emmanuel Bastet. In 2021-22 Barbara collaborated with directors/authors wearelusi.com on the creation of a new piece based on Alice in Wonderland, performed in a spiegeltent and premiering in Milan in December 2021.