charles
founder of the company
Born on a snowy december evening in 1986 and in Paris, Charles Di Meglio sets at very young an age his interests in theatre and music. Once graduated from school, he enters the Francis Poulenc Conservatory in Paris, acting at the same time in a vast span of plays, both modern (Genet, Beckett, Duras, Pinter, Pasolini &c) and classic (Wilde, Feydeau, Marivaux, Hugo, Sophocle &c).
Quickly orienting himself towards directing, he presents in 2006 a praised production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé Oghma’s first show.
His encounter with Baroque music and theatre is critical, and he studies them notably with Eugène Green, and with Marshall Pynkoski and Jeannette Lajeunesse-Zingg, in Toronto – with whom he still works regularly on their French opera productions.
He stages Jean Racine’s Phèdre & Hippolyte in 2008, confronting the text with excerpts from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Matthäus-Paßion, performed in Paris and in Angoulême.
A keen photographer as well, interested in adolescent frailty, he directs a film during the same year, Listless angels.
A counter-tenor and a lutenist, his theatrical work mainly concentrates on the Baroque period. He reflects on how the baroque codes may help our theatre, to find its lost yet necessary sacrality.
During the 2009-2010 season, apart from working anew with Opera Atelier in Toronto, on Iphigénie en Tauride by C. W. Glück, he imagined a show on William Shake-speare’s Sonnets, To.The.Onlie.Begetter., translated into French by himself, and created Les Avantures d’Ulisse, a show produced by the Company, an idea cast by the guest harpsichordist Nicolas Andlauer, around Homer’s Odyssey.
2010-11 was a very busy season for both the Company and himself, with revivals of Ulisse and To.The.Onlie.Begetter. throughout France, as well as with the mounting of a show on the violist Tobias Hume, and, moreover, with the shooting of the Company’s second film, which he directed: Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, a study of duty, after the short story by Oscar Wilde.
He was called back to work with Opera Atelier in 2011-2012, with a production of Lully’s Armide, staged in Toronto, at the Opéra Royal of Versailles, and at the Glimmerglass Festival, a show which was very well received worldwide, and much acclaimed – and will renew this collaboration in 2014 with their production of Lully’s Persée
His 2012-2013 season is mainly devoted to Oghma, with the baroque declamation of sacred texts, translated during the French seventeenth century, in a cycle of Holy readings, and the translation of works of Elizabeth I, for a show on the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth R.. Late August, he will participate in a concert with Mélodie Millot on the seventeenth century galant vision of shepherds.