Biography
The designer, stage director and producer Zuzana Gilhuus hails from Bratislava and currently lives in Norway. She has devoted to music and fine art since her childhood. She studied textile design at the Secondary School of Applied Arts, set and costume design, and opera direction at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. Moreover, she attended L'École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden, as well as opera direction master classes led by Ruth Berghaus in Berlin. In 2000 and 2001, she served as artistic director of the Opera of the State Theatre in Košice, Slovakia. Her creations have been acclaimed by domestic and foreign specialist critics, who have praised the singularity of her visual idiom, with the graphic means playing a dramatic role and possessing the ability to give rise to remarkable metaphor and afford a novel view of the relations between the characters, as well as her acute sense for the rhythm and rules of music. In 2004, her production of Alcina at the Slovak National Theatre earned her a nomination for the prestigious Dosky award, winning the Best Costumes prize. Her staging of Lucrezia Borgia was shortlisted for the Dosky 2007 award in the Best Direction category. The most noteworthy productions she has directed and for which she has created the sets and costumes include those of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (1998, Košice), Puccini’s La bohéme 2000, Košice; 2008, Trondheim, Norway) Verdi’s Nabucco (1999, Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava), Bellini’s I puritani (2001, Banská Bystrica, Slovakia), Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (2005, Trondheim), Handel’s Rodelinda (2003, Oslo) and Alcina (2004, Bratislava), and Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia (2008, Bratislava). In addition, she has designed the sets for the productions of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (2004, Bremerhaven, Germany), Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (2006, FKI Drammen, Sandnes, Sandefjord, Norway), Kálman’s Die Csárdásfürstin (2011, TSO MT Trondheim; 2012, RO Brummundal, Norway) and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (2012, TSO MT Trondheim). In the autumn of 2015, she staged new productions of Verdi’s Il trovatore at the State Theatre in Košice.