BIOGRAPHY
François Rochaix
Swiss theater and opera director François Rochaix is a former Associate Director of the A.R.T. and a former Director of the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training. His directing work at the A.R.T. includes Antigone, The Bacchae, The Wild Duck, Tartuffe, and The Oresteia, as well as Michel Vinaver's Overboard, Agamemnon/The Libation Bearers, and other productions at the Institute. Mr. Rochaix has worked extensively in theaters and opera houses throughout Europe and the U.S. In 1963 he founded the Theatre de l'Atelier in Geneva, where he worked until 1975. He then became the General Director of the Theatre de Carouge through 1981, when he became a freelance director and began his work in opera. His opera credits include Turn of the Screw, Pellas et Mlisande, The Rake's Progress, and Dialogues des Carmelites at the Grand Theatre de Geneve; as well as productions at Scottish Opera, Opera North, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Washington Opera, and Seattle Opera, where his work includes Wagner's complete Ring cycle. Mr. Rochaix's theater credits include Ibsen's A Doll's House in Bergen, Norway; Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 in Geneva, Vitrac's Victor in Moscow, and a Swiss, Norwegian, American, and Russian co-production of The Oresteia in French and Norwegian, presented in Geneva in 1991. Mr. Rochaix served as Artistic Director of La Fête des Vignerons de 1999, the massive Festival of the Winegrowers in Switzerland.