Barokopera Amsterdam

The Indian Queen, based on a play by John Dryden and Robert Howard, is one of Henry Purcell’s most intriguing semi-operas. First performed as a spoken drama in 1664 – more than three decades before Purcell composed his music – the work has come down to us in fragmentary form. Hovering between theatre and opera, speech and song, its structure remains open, inviting each generation to fill that space in its own way. The original plot tells of an impossible encounter between the Incas of Peru and the Aztecs of Mexico – civilisations that could only meet in the seventeenth-century European imagination. In it, the Americas are a distant, alien world, a screen onto which the story’s authors projected their colonial fantasies and exoticism. Over time, directors have wrestled with the question of how to stage this work. Artists such as Guy Cassiers and Peter Sellars have sought ways to bring it into dialogue with the present, exposing the tension between baroque beauty and the depiction of colonial fantasies. 

For this production, BarokOpera Amsterdam invites a team of Latin American artists to take on this challenge from their own historical and embodied experience. Among them are professional singers based in the Netherlands and members of Papaya Kuir, a lesbian trans-feminist collective founded by and for Latin American migrants and refugees. The dramaturgy takes migration and diversity as its starting point: people who migrate never travel alone; they carry memories, rituals, languages, sounds and ancestral knowledge with them. We set the emotions evoked by Purcell’s music against the lived experiences of the migrant artists on stage, so that the soundworld of the seventeenth century resonates with their sense of displacement.  

Ligiana Costa and Sofia Boito, whose previous collaborations include the critically acclaimed Marias do Brasil – presented at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 2025 – structure the work as a rehearsal room on stage. A company of Latin American migrant artists comes together to prepare The Indian Queen: a work that once portrayed their continent from a great distance. Here the central character, Purcell’s Indian Queen, dissolves into plurality, and Indian Queens reclaim Abya Yala, as the American continent is called by many Indigenous peoples.  

Musical direction is entrusted to Purcell specialist Frédérique Chauvet, who conducts BarokOpera Amsterdam. Playing on period instruments, the ensemble brings clarity and vitality to Purcell’s score, which is treated here as both archive and living material. Music, theatre, sound and video come together in a staging that invites reflection on colonialism, identity and memory, while preserving the expressive theatricality of baroque theatre. This project aims to present opera as a porous space open to inclusion, dialogue and intercultural learning; the opera stage is reclaimed as a place where histories are questioned and new forms of collective presence can emerge.  

Musical direction: Frédérique Chauvet, Orchestra: BarokOpera Amsterdam Director: Ligiana Costa Dramaturgy: Ligiana Costa & Sofia Boito Set and costume design: Renato Bolleli Rebouças Choreography: Flávia Pinheiro Soloists: to be announced Chorus: members of Papaya Kuir