Two to tango

Getting a phone call in the Louvre announcing your appointment to the Order of Canada is remarkable enough. It’s even more remarkable for someone who doesn’t own a cell phone. Yet this is precisely what happened to Opera Atelier founding co-artistic directors Marshall Pynkoski and Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg in December.

“When we go on tour, our office gives us a phone in case of emergency, and suddenly this phone was ringing,” says Pynkoski, who has no TV or computer at home. “We’re not Luddites, we don’t think these things are awful,” says Pynkoski. “We just felt it was too much of a distraction to be able to think creatively.”

And creative they have been. Since founding their groundbreaking company in 1985, the same year they were married, Pynkoski and Zingg have built Opera Atelier into Canada’s premier opera/ballet company. It brings productions from the 17th and 18th centuries to life, in collaboration with Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra.

With Pynkoski stage directing and Zingg choreographing, they have toured some of the world’s greatest venues, including La Scala, the Salzburg Festival, the Rossini Festival and the Royal Opera House at Versailles.

The Order of Canada recognizes Pynkoski and Zingg’s contributions to opera and ballet in Canada, their mentorship of young artists at The School of Atelier Ballet for 33 years, and their commitment to live performance. They’ve also received Dora Mavor Moore Awards, the Ordre des Arts et des lettres from France, and Alumni Achievement Awards.

“To connect with one another and to connect with what’s on stage and with people around you in a communal experience is tremendously important and very rare nowadays,” says Zingg.

Pynoski agrees: “We want people to come to our productions and become broadened, become more complete human beings as we expand their imaginations.”

Pynkoski and Zingg are collaborators in work and in life, finishing each other’s sentences like a verbal pas de deux. This is appropriate considering the two first met as students in Ryerson’s theatre performance program, and started dating while studying in Toronto with Russian ballet teacher Flora Lojekova.

“We had really great ballet teachers at Ryerson, such as John Marshall,” says Zingg. “We were very fortunate, our Ryerson teachers knew what ballet was in terms of its roots, in terms of an art form.”

This grounding in ballet’s history would serve them well as they travelled to Paris together to study further, financing their studies by performing two shows a night, seven days a week, at the Moulin Rouge.

Back in Toronto, they started performing at the Royal Ontario Museum, first alone, then with singers from the opera school. They began their collaboration with Tafelmusik and David Mirvish, who helped launch the company by adding them to his subscription series at the Royal Alexandra Theatre.

“He had been attending our shows, and said, ‘What you need is a real theatre.’ Within a few seasons we had grown so much, we moved to the Elgin Theatre,” says Pynkoski. Opera Atelier’s upcoming season promises to be their most ambitious yet, featuring internationally acclaimed bass-baritone Douglas Williams as Don Giovanni next fall and an all-star Canadian cast in Handel’s The Resurrection in April 2020.

The secret of their success?

“I always say to people, if you start something, start small, grow slowly and never give up,” says Zingg. “And that’s exactly what we’ve done.”

This story appears in the June edition of the Ryerson University Magazine. Read the whole issue online (external link) . It's also available as an accessible edition (external link) .