"It`s like a pit stop in motor racing"

Viva Foster has many passions. One of them is diving. That has stood her in good stead in the current lake stage production of Der Freischütz, in which she has many roles to play. Early on she tried out stunts to see what exactly the vocalists could manage.

When Agathe thrashes about from side to side and back and forth in her alarmingly lopsided bed for what seems like an eternity, The Exorcist and scary scenes from other movies come to mind. It is one of the moments in the Bregenz Freischütz which will remain etched in the memory of many spectators. However, it's not the singer of the role of Agathe who performs this scene, evening after evening, but her stunt double Viva Foster.

The New Zealander has a cheerful nature. Is the rumour true that during a performance of Der Freischütz she spends more time changing costumes and in makeup than she does on stage? Yes, she says with a laugh. She can be seen six times in the opera, always as somebody else. “I’m on right at the beginning, but it's difficult to recognise me there,” she says with a cheeky grin: “I’m lying in the coffin and get buried on top of the hill. Then I'm in the water ballet and I’ve got shining stars in my hair. Then comes the spooky scene on the bed, then the maidens dancing in a circle, and finally the grand finale where we’re all on stage once more.”

Aren’t all those costume changes a bit stressful? Viva Foster brushes it off, saying it was “a little demanding” at the beginning of the rehearsals, "until everyone had learned their timing. But with time you and your backstage team know exactly what to do when. Now it's like a pit stop in motor racing.”

Viva Foster grew up in Dunedin, New Zealand, and was a Junior Associate at the New Zealand School of Dance before completing her studies at the National Theatre Ballet School in Melbourne, Australia. During her time there she was a member of the country’s first youth dance group. Twelve years ago she moved to the United Kingdom. Since then she has worked there as well as in Switzerland, Austria, and Thailand – “wherever, I’m a freelancer.”

Der Freischütz is the fourth production at the Bregenz Festival she has worked on. She hadn’t heard the piece before, the best known German opera of the Romantic period. Viva does so much in the show that it's quite hard to sum up. Dance, performance, stunts? “A bit of everything,” she says with a smile. But there was more than that, wasn't there? Yes, she confirms: in April she was in Bregenz for a little less than a week. On a special mission, so to speak. Months before the rehearsals officially started. It was about generally trying out particular ideas and seeing whether the singers, too, could be asked to perform certain acrobatic moves. So it was that in the spring Viva Foster could be found on the lake stage, plunging from the serpent into the watery depths and acting as a corpse in the water. For the Rigoletto production five years ago she was here before the start of rehearsals as well, as a kind of “guinea pig” trying out stunts.

For Freischütz, a large part of this pre-rehearsal work focused on the choreography of the stunt performers in the various water scenes,  Viva Foster explains, so that she would know what to do when she had to instruct the singers and actors during rehearsals. She really enjoyed this preparatory work with the team, she says. The fact that the sporting all-rounder is also a trained diving instructor was certainly no disadvantage here.

Water - that element is inescapable in this production. For Viva Foster, too, it makes this lake stage production “so very different" to the ones that went before, Carmen, Rigoletto and Madame Butterfly, where she would whirl through the air attached to ropes and perform other acrobatic stunts. “It’s very demanding wading through water or ballet dancing in wet, heavy costumes,” she admits. All the same, she adores the water ballet. But the sequence that beats everything else, she says, is the one high up in the air on the floating bed. “That's something really special for me, because it's a kind of solo.” But isn't that extremely hard work? “Yes” is her initial response, but after reflecting for a moment she qualifies it: "It’s only a short scene, isn't it ... 30 or 40 seconds? Afterwards I lie on the bed for a few minutes and can rest while Max sees his nightmares come true..."

Below you can find photos of Viva Foster from the production and from the rehearsals in April 2024.

(ami)