Bibliotheekmedewerker
After her studies in musicology, Sigrid T'Hooft worked for Flemish radio as an editor of classical music programs. During her studies she started intensive research into ancient dance with a Master Thesis on French Renaissance Dancemusic as a result. She founded the dance ensembles "Passo Ostinato", "Fontainebleau" and "Corpo Barocco", with which she has developed numerous programmes.
Since the 1990s, she has increasingly made a name for herself as an opera director, with an emphasis on historically informed performance practice. Her staging of Handel's Radamisto in 2009 brought her onto the international stage and led to her venture into freelance work as a choreographer/director.
In the following years she continued her work at the Goethe-Theater Bad Lauchstädt (Germany), Drottningholm Theater (Sweden), Perm Opera (Russia), Nationalteatret Oslo (Norway), Teatro Olimpico (Italy) and many other venues.
She has been invited by the Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alte Musik as well as the Händelfestspiele in Göttingen and Halle, and has had a close working relationship with the Baroque Band of the Budapest Festival Orchestra for more than a decade.
She has choreographed several dance performances with her baroquedance company Corpo Barocco, staged more than 30 operas, as well as directing numerous "mise-en-geste" concerts.
Her repertoire includes not only numerous rediscoveries of long-forgotten works from the 17th and 18th centuries, but also established works by Handel, Mozart and Haydn. Her staging has recently extended to Romantic works (A. Borodin) and spoken theatre (Kotzebue & Ibsen).
Her last major choreographic creations were the extended ballets for Broschi's opera "Merope" to compositions by Leclair and Rasetti, and the choreography for Monteverdi's "La Favola d'Orfeo", including for the new composition by Ivan Fischer of Striggio’s original finale for the bacchantes.
Sigrid T'Hooft has taught baroque movement to singers in the early music departments of the Conservatories of Leipzig and The Hague and at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, as well as early dance at numerous conservatories in Belgium and abroad. For many years she has been a valued researcher and lecturer at numerous international institutions and conferences, and is welcomed as an inspiring guest teacher of historical dance and period drama at many European institutions and courses.
