WORKSHOP | Historical Gestures | Sigrid T’HOOFT

Sigrid T’Hooft is a choreographer, opera and theater director, and musicologist.

After completing her studies in musicology, Sigrid T’Hooft worked as a classical music editor at the Flemish radio station Klara. At the same time, in the early 1990s, she began to make a name for herself as a choreographer and opera director specializing in historically informed performance practice.

Her breakthrough as a director came with her 2009 production of George Frideric Handel’s *Radamisto* at the Badisches Staatstheater in Karlsruhe. In the years that followed, T’Hooft was engaged by the Goethe Theater in Bad Lauchstädt, the Drottningholm Palace Theater, the Perm Opera Theater, the Trondelag Theater in Trondheim, and other venues.

She has also been invited by the Paris-based opera ensemble Opera Fuoco and the Göttingen Handel Festival. Since 2011, she has collaborated regularly with the Budapest Festival Orchestra and has worked with leading conductors in the field of early music, including Laurence Cummings, Reinhard Goebel, Peter Van Heyghen, Sigiswald Kuijken, Andrew Parrott, Mark Tatlow, and many others. She has staged more than 25 operas as well as numerous “mise-en-geste” concerts. She has choreographed several dance performances for her Baroque dance troupe, Corpo Barocco.

Its repertoire includes not only many rediscoveries of long-forgotten works from the 17th and 18th centuries, but also the standard repertoire of Handel, Mozart, and Joseph Haydn. More recently, however, she has also performed 19th-century works, such as those by Alexander Borodin (Prince Igor, St. Petersburg 1890) and a play by August von Kotzebue (Armuth und Edelsinn, 1795).

Sigrid T’Hooft taught historically informed performance practice at the International Handel Academy in Karlsruhe (Baroque gestures and Baroque dance) and at the conservatories in Leipzig and The Hague, as well as historical dance in Trossingen.

In 2019, she staged Riccardo Broschi’s opera seria Merope at the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music and choreographed the dance interludes for Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo at the Vicenza Opera Festival (conducted by Iván Fischer).