Tony Hoffman / www.creative-paradox.ca

“Hold it,” Patrick Eakin Young calls out at the two witches who are hugging and scampering as theatrical witches often do when delighting in treachery. The women stop in their tracks as Young scrambles out onto the stage of the Winchester Street Theatre, into the midst of the act-three rehearsal of Henry Purcell’s 17th-century opera, Dido and Aeneas. Young moves a piece of tape on the floor. “Don’t go past here. This is the front of the stage now,” he tells them.

The two women take another shot at their song. Although they’re singing along to a harpsichord, an instrument with which Purcell would have been familiar, the British composer would not know what to make of the large screen behind them. It flickers with fragmented images — dancers, fire, visual white noise — that might have been plucked from a commercial for European chocolates. The sorceress who’s about to join the witches is played by a man, counter-tenor Andrew Pickett.

Young is known for such remixing. In his 2007 directorial debut, a rock-opera-ballet set in space, he used YouTube clips and B-movie footage. As far as he’s concerned, opera’s over-the-top emotions and its focus on spectacle should be an ideal entertainment for twentysomethings like  himself.

“A lot of my friends have never seen an opera but they’ll go see a contemporary art show at the AGO. They’ll go see Arcade Fire or Fleet Foxes or they’ll go see a Sigur Rós concert, which is practically classical music,” says Young. “But there’s something about opera keeping them at bay. They feel like it doesn’t belong to them. We’re trying to make opera belong to them as well.”

Despite his contemporary aesthetic, Young resists the temptation to meddle with the music. The musicians for Dido and Aeneas, eight members of the Classical Music Consort conducted by Ashiq Aziz, will play the classical score straight, on period instruments.

“Patrick hadn’t heard Dido before I told him about it,” says Aziz, the less dramatic partner in the collaboration. He and Young attended Upper Canada College together, fell out of touch and then met up again in London, England, through mutual friends. That’s where they brainstormed their first collaboration, Handel’s Acis and Galatea, which got good reviews at the 2008 Toronto Fringe Festival.

“I had heard Klaus Nomi singing Dido’s Lament.”

“That is very different,” chides Aziz.

“I don’t come from a classical-music world,” concedes Young, “but I’m totally open to it. My taste now stretches from Monteverdi to the Fuck Buttons.”

“I don’t even know what the Fuck Buttons are,” shrugs Aziz, who has spent a good chunk of the year conducting a series celebrating Hayden’s bicentenary.

Choosing Purcell’s opera helps bridge this gulf. It’s short, in English and has a simple story: a Trojan prince shows up in Carthage, falls in love with the widowed queen, is tricked by a sorceress into leaving her, which results in the heartbroken queen committing suicide. Cue Klaus Nomi. In this production, the performers are young up-and-comers, not high-priced stars. Young’s of-the-moment bag of tricks — the projections, the unconventional lighting, the cross-gender casting and clever use of surtitles to comment on the action — are all much cheaper than traditional opera sets and costumes. Several scenes in the piece call for dancers; Young videoed professional dancer friends in New York and projects their performance onto the stage. The result is a package which is both more modest and more extreme than conventional opera. With Aziz as guardian of the music’s authenticity, they’re hoping conventional opera-lovers won’t be put off by the cool injection.

“You can rewrite opera. You can pop an opera. You can turn La Bohème into Rent. But you can also do the music as it was performed then, but let it communicate something new,” says Young. “We’re playing with form but at the centre of it is still the emotional experience.”