If you want to sing the role of Orfeo in Orfeo Ed Euridice you have to be a woman with a very low voice or a man with a very high one. Enter Flavio Oliver, counter-tenor. The choreographer David Bolger tells Michael Seaver why he agreed to direct Opera Ireland's production of 'Orfeo Ed Euridice'

High notes? No problem. He can sing up as far as B flat - and that's high.

Oliver was born in Italy, has spent most of his life in Spain and is in Dublin to sing the role of Orfeo for the sixth time in his career. So how did he come to be a counter-tenor? "I think in my case," he says, adjusting his glasses and nodding thoughtfully, "it was an accident. A beautiful accident."

It happened when he was 12 and subject to the dreaded voice change, which tends to turn even the most ethereal boy soprano into a creature that sounds like a cat being fed into a food processor. "When the voice change was coming," Oliver explains, "my teacher continued working with me, and then my voice developed at the very highest range. Like soprano, you know? At that moment I could reach until F.

"Like," he adds cheerfully, "Queen." What? As in Freddie Mercury? "No, no," he says, chuckling. "Night Queen. As in Mozart's Magic Flute." The high notes Mozart wrote for his evil empress are literally hair-raising, which makes it all the more mysterious that by the time Oliver was 17 he was studying to be a baritone. Even now he doesn't have the high speaking voice one might expect from a counter-tenor. He shrugs a slow-motion Latin shrug.

It's all, he agrees with an impish grin, a bit of a mystery. But then lots of things about singing are mysterious. Take the phenomenon of the operatic castrato, for whom the role of Orfeo was originally written. "A very strange case, not just in the history of music but in the history of human beings," is how Oliver sums it up. "People who cut other people's genitals: this is very strange. But at the time it was a very big help to poor families."

In the early 17th century boys with beautiful voices were shipped off to be castrated in secret - it was always, officially, against the law - and those who survived the butchery often became the singing superstars of the day. Like Michael Jackson, offers Oliver. Um, no: maybe not. "Like Queen, then." As in Freddie Mercury.

For years operatic roles written for castrati just weren't mentioned in polite society. With the revival of baroque opera they were sung by contraltos, a solution that was musically if not dramatically satisfying. Orfeo, with its fiendishly demanding tessitura, was considered too high for male singers, and for many years it was the property of Kathleen Ferrier, Janet Baker and other divas.Oliver, for one, is glad. Orfeo is a fantastic role for a male singer, he says. "He is like a person who arrives in front of a great wall. You can find this dynamic every day in your life, in little circumstances or in big ones. To be asked to go beyond what is possible. For me Orfeo does that. I have a vision of Orfeo. It's like when you arrive at the end of the earth and there is the sea. The . . . cliff. Do you jump or do you go back? For me Orfeo is the jump."

Gluck's opera is one of the most powerful portraits of grief in the canon of Western art, but the music is fabulous and it all ends happily. The crux of the whole thing, says Oliver, is Orfeo's leap of faith in setting off into the unknown - which he himself, he says, is particularly well placed to portray on stage.

"When I was 19 I gave up singing, because I fell in love with my dance teacher, a beautiful Cuban girl. I dedicated my life to dance, which I had studied from the age of 12. Then I came back to music as a composer." He has written music for television and ballet, as well as appearing in concert as a jazz pianist with his fusion group.

Add to that a fistful of successful recordings and a bucketload of acclaimed live performances in baroque opera. "I change a lot in my life, so I try to transmit this experience in the role of Orfeo," he declares, launching into an explanation that involves energy, kinesis, intensity and "multidimensional interpretation". High notes? High Noon, more like.

... Arminta Wallace

It's normally a voiceless ornament for the action, a visual intermezzo from the singing - and, from a choreographer's point of view, a lucrative sideline. But dance in opera is rarely taken seriously. Frequently cut from productions, it is regarded as holding up the drama and getting in the way of the singing. But choreographers are reclaiming control, reinvigorating opera - and not as dancemakers but as directors.

For Opera Ireland's new production of Orfeo Ed Euridice, Christoph Gluck's 1762 work, David Bolger, the artistic director of CoisCéim Dance Theatre, is joining a string of choreographers who have directed the opera, including Frederick Ashton, Lucinda Childs and Mark Morris. "I nearly didn't do it," he says, talking about the period after Dieter Kaegi of Opera Ireland approached him, when he began to listen to and research the work. "It was a bit daunting, firstly because I'm not really used to opera singers, and I don't know the temperament or the area very well," he says. "But I also wanted to take time and think about what my approach to Orfeo might be. If the ideas didn't come then I felt there was no point directing, because on that first rehearsal day I'd have to face the cast with a completely clear concept."

Surely choreographers are well suited to the mix of art forms that come together in opera. Don't they interact with music and design every day, and aren't most of them fluent collaborators? "Yes, of course," he concedes. "Also, choreographers think primarily in a visual way, so it makes sense that we might be reasonably adept at visualising a score."

The influential magazine Ballet Tanz recently suggested that choreographers have returned to a practice not seen since the 18th century, "when the musical pieces . . . were always dance dramas [ and] the baroque chorus was treated with brilliant frivolity: hunters, farmers and soldiers appeared in ensembles, dancing festively, as a foil for a nobility which sought self-expression in the opera".

Through the 19th and 20th centuries choral and individual scenes became more integrated, and, with productions emphasising realism, divertissements - the short dances inserted in ballets to show off technical skills - seemed inappropriate. Those that remained usually had some link to the subject, but the association tended to be ornamental, and so they were culled.

In spite of this, major dance figures such as Ashton and Lev Ivanov worked with major opera houses, and, as the tide turned against realism, composers from Schoenberg to Tippett used dance as an integral part of their drama. This influence grew to the point at which dancers took on leading silent roles, such as Pina Bausch's part in Yvonne, Princess Of Burgundy, a 1973 work by Boris Blacher. Choreographers' mastery of opera seemed complete when a figure such as Jan Fabre could extend his first ballet, Das Glas Im Kopf Wird Vom Glas, from 1987, into an opera, The Minds Of Helena Troubleyn.

With its dramatically important dances, Orfeo Ed Euridice has always appealed to choreographers. Initial approaches were somewhat tame: a barefoot Isadora Duncan performed sympathetically to its dance music, while an influential production by Émile Jacques-Dalcroze, the Swiss eurhythmics pioneer, arranged the music, movement, lighting and space into perfect harmony. It wasn't until George Balanchine's controversial production at New York's Metropolitan Opera, in 1936, that choreography's growing assertion was signalled. For this production the opera became a ballet, with the singers bullied into the pit with the orchestra and the dancers claiming the stage.

More recently, Emio Greco and Pieter Scholten's version of Orfeo for Opera North was equally controversial. It split opinion at Edinburgh International Festival this year. Like Balanchine, Greco sought to assert the dance and, particularly, himself as a choreographer within the production. "Dance has to exist with dignity and have a reason. It is never used to illustrate the action," he said before the opening.

So how has David Bolger fared on such treacherous ground? Unlike Greco's, Bolger's choreography incorporates a storytelling tradition. Whether in his large-scale Rite Of Spring or minuscule Chamber Made, he is able to construct an often-unexpected dramatic narrative in the midst of his movement. It is this strength that is evident when he talks about his plans for Orfeo Ed Euridice. For him the drama is key.

The story is simple: a wife dies; her husband grieves; the gods offer one more chance; the husband goes to the underworld to get his wife, being warned not to talk to or look at her; eventually, of course, he does; she dies again; the gods intervene again, bringing her back to life; and they live happy ever after.

"Behind the simplicity is a very complex dramatic web," says Bolger. "I really wanted to pin everything on the character of Orfeo and the idea that this is an emotional journey rather than a physical one. It's like he has locked himself in a room to grieve, and the journey comes from his head and imagination, so he doesn't go to hell but, rather, hell comes to him. Maybe then we can flip things around, so maybe she didn't die after all, but he is merely questioning his love for her."

This conceptual risk has been smoothed by the arrival in the rehearsal room of the Spanish counter-tenor Flavio Oliver (see panel). Having played Orfeo in six productions, and with a background in circus and dance, he is enthusiastic about Bolger's ideas. Bolger says: "He's a very physical performer and is willing to try anything. This gives me so much freedom, since he doesn't mind singing while upside down and can pick up movement phrases really quickly. In fact at times I've had to hold him back and say, hang on, pace yourself, it'll be a long night. He's onstage for the whole opera, so he really has to hold your attention and pace the emotional line.

"I've also worked a lot with the chorus, and they are moving more than they normally do. There's often uncertainty about what to do with a large group of singers, but I've tried to get them to integrate their singing and physical movement, which not only helps the dynamic of their singing but is also really important in the telling of the story. I've also asked the dancers to mouth some of the choruses, so that they're included as part of the storytelling."

This blurring of art forms reflects the spirit of Gluck, who felt dance should be integral to opera, helping it to flow rather than holding it up, as the static, formal dances of the time could do. He also favoured the naturalism of simple melodies, harmonies and speech rhythms that drove the drama forward. Bolger's unaffected movements complement these musical values, and his reflective Orfeo mirrors the notion of enlightened man that is at the core of the opera.

"He is questioning his love, and even Euridice questions that love in the third act when he won't look at her. He loves her, but there is something wrong. So he is in this predicament. Not only can he not look at her, but he can't tell her why. So they end up, well, kind of arguing. It's not exactly a domestic tiff, but in some ways it is. There's something up, and they're not talking about it, not communicating."

What Gluck couldn't avoid was a happy ending. The first performance of Orfeo Ed Euridice, in Vienna, took place on the Austrian emperor's name day, so the composer had to change the ending of the Orfeo myth. Although Bolger, like many directors, has cut the festive ballet that Gluck decided on, he was intrigued by the notion of a happy ending. "When Euridice dies again Orfeo threatens to kill himself. But then Amore appears and says it's OK, she's not really dead, you can have her back. When I first read about this second chance it seemed a bit like Bobby walking out of the shower in Dallas." With a slavishly realistic treatment this happy moment, coming from nowhere, can jar and seem trite, but the metaphor that Bolger threads though the three acts should lessen the blow. "It completes the journey from the funeral at the beginning to a celebration in the end, like black going to white, and the colour spectrum in between representing the emotions on the journey taken."

Orfeo Ed Euridice opens at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, on Sunday, with performances on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday; Opera Ireland's Rigoletto opens on Saturday, with performances on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday