MARSHALL PYNKOSKI IS SITTING cross-legged on the floor of the studio at the School of Atelier Ballet on the fourth floor of Toronto's historic St. Lawrence Hall. He smiles joyously as he watches two young dancers rehearse a demanding piece. Pynkoski's wife and creative collaborator, Jeannette Zingg, who is seated a metre or two away, scrutinizes every step the dancers make, her long, supple fingers working the control panel of a boom box as she repeatedly stops the music to offer advice. In a few months, the dancers will perform the piece at the Art Gallery of Ontario as part of Dance Through Time, a weekly series of free performances sponsored in part by the Imperial Oil Foundation. "You look great," Pynkoski says with evident enthusiasm. "Really, really charming."

Nathaniel Kozlow remembers the exhilaration of preparing for a Dance Through Time performance. Two summers ago, he danced a demanding segment of Giselle as part of the program. "Dance Through Time is tremendous for young dancers," says Kozlow, who is now an apprentice with the National Ballet of Canada. "Jeannette selects major roles for students to perform, which is excellent training and a wonderful experience. It's material that would only go to lead dancers in a professional company."

The seven-year-old program, however, is just one product of the exceptionally fruitful partnership between Pynkoski and Zingg. Eighteen years ago they founded Opera Atelier, a company dedicated to bringing operas of the baroque period (roughly 1600 to 1800) to contemporary audiences. Many of the works had not been performed for more than two centuries.

What is remarkable about Opera Atelier productions is their striking blend of authenticity and originality, an achievement that has won the company international acclaim. Music is performed on period instruments, usually by members of Toronto's renowned baroque orchestra, Tafelmusik, and gestures, staging, costumes and lighting are faithful to the spirit of the times. "They are unique productions," says Jeanne Lamon, the music director of Tafelmusik. Lamon has been collaborating with Pynkoski (who directs the operas) and Zingg (who does the choreography and dances in them) for almost as long as Opera Atelier has existed. "They truly capture the baroque period. The performances are ravishing."

"The works we're performing include some of the most spectacular music and ballet in the history of western civilization," says Pynkoski, explaining that ballet plays an integral role in baroque opera. "The works disappeared, not because they were bad, but because they were politically untouchable after the revolutions that swept through much of Europe. Nobody was going to produce an opera written to glorify Louis XIV, for example, if the political powers of the time said he was the greatest tyrant in history."

Opera Atelier's daring foray into the world of baroque opera has brought it not only international recognition but also a good number of invitations to perform outside Canada. The company, whose largest and most lavish productions include about 80 singers, dancers and musicians, tours internationally at least every two years. Over the last decade, it has performed in the United States, England, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Singapore (where, in 1999, it opened the Singapore Arts Festival with its productions of Dido and Aeneas and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) and is currently considering invitations to perform in Hong Kong, Taipei and Macau. As well, Pynkoski and Zingg have collaborated on three operas with the Houston Grand Opera. The most recent of these – Claudio Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea, which was first staged in Venice in 1643 – was performed in Houston in 2001 to rave reviews. "An unending feast of gorgeous sound and visual beauty," wrote Charles Ward of the Houston Chronicle in describing the production.

Opera Atelier's Canadian productions have also received high praise from the critics. The Toronto Star's William Littler rated the company's fall 2000 production of Persée, which had last been performed in 1770 to celebrate the wedding of Marie Antoinette and the future Louis XVI, as "the operatic event of the year." And the late Peter Dyson, writing from Toronto for the British magazine Opera, described the production as "among the most brilliant seen here in a long while."

Opera Atelier opened its current season with a production of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Médée, which was first presented at the Paris Opera in 1693. Based on the Greek myth, the work tells the story of Medea, who takes revenge on her philandering husband, Jason, by murdering their two children, along with Jason's lover, Creuse. While the production received mixed reviews, there was certainly plenty of praise for what Robert Everett-Green of the Globe and Mail called Opera Atelier's "biggest and perhaps riskiest" production. "Musically, the opening night performance was a banquet for Tantalus," wrote Everett-Green. Littler described the production as a "spectacular season-opening production."

TALL AND SLENDER, with a soft, subdued voice, Zingg was born in Zurich and moved to Toronto as a child when her father, the late Dr. Walter Zingg, accepted the position of director of surgical research at the city's Hospital for Sick Children. The young Jeannette enjoyed all areas of the arts, but it was dance that captivated her, and she set her mind on becoming a dancer, spending a number of summers during her teenage years training intensively in France, England and Denmark. After high school, she studied dance at Toronto's Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University), where she met Pynkoski.

The exuberant, articulate Pynkoski stands six-foot-five and has long, wavy black hair that he pulls back into a ponytail. The son of fundamentalist Christian parents, he grew up in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. Pynkoski attended church services three times a week, but never went to the theatre as a child and didn't see a movie until he was 17. His father, Paul, worked for a dry cleaner and his mother, Phyllis, stayed at home to raise her three children and later took a job as a bank teller. Pynkoski speaks lovingly of his parents, noting the economic sacrifices they made to ensure that their children had such things as music lessons.

It was through a high-school teacher that Pynkoski discovered a love of the stage, which led him to study theatre arts at Ryerson. As part of the program, he studied dance with the renowned instructor John Marshall, who encouraged him to make ballet his career. Pynkoski switched to the dance program in his second year and often found himself paired with Zingg. After graduating, the two followed separate paths – Pynkoski joined the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School, while Zingg became an apprentice with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal.

Their paths converged again when they became professional dancers in Toronto, appearing in productions at Young Peoples Theatre (now the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People) and with Inner Stage, a company that performs in schools. They began attending Tafelmusik concerts together and were completely taken by the performances, particularly dance pieces lifted from operas and ballets of the 17th and 18th centuries. "Hearing baroque repertoire on period instruments overwhelmed us," says Pynkoski. "We were hearing music we'd never heard before, by composers we'd often never heard of. It was shocking, because we had strong music and theatre educations."

The beauty and complexity of the music left the couple wondering how people had danced to it during the baroque period. "We'd been involved in Mozart operas, for which choreographers would make up courtly dances," he says. "No one knew what the dances of the period were actually like, though. We started looking for answers."

Their research began at New York's Public Library for the Performing Arts and later took the pair to France (where Pynkoski and Zingg supported themselves by dancing at Paris's famous Moulin Rouge nightclub). They studied material held at the Bibliothèque Nationale and the archives of the Paris Opera.

To their astonishment, they found notebooks with diagrams showing overhead views of the flow of the dances, along with notations depicting the steps and gestures used. "There were books with instructions for reading the notations," Pynkoski says. "The symbols literally tell you whether you're in the air or on the ground, what your legs are doing and what your arms are doing." Dance masters of the day used these manuals to teach the children of aristocratic families. Many of the same dances were incorporated into operas, then a popular form of entertainment.

Back in Toronto, Zingg and Pynkoski continued their research, consulting experts in the United States, Australia, Denmark and England, while continuing their work as professional dancers. Zingg worked as an instructor with the Children's Theatre Company and then began to give lessons in the church-basement studio that she and Pynkoski were renting for their own work. These classes, which incorporated baroque dance, grew into the School of Atelier Ballet.

Zingg and Pynkoski's passion for baroque ballet and opera continued to grow. They began performing ballet excerpts from baroque operas at Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum, wearing costumes that were reproductions of those in the museum's textile collection. Initially, they danced by themselves in the galleries to recorded music while members of the audience stood. The performances became very popular, and soon the couple added a harpsichordist and singers to the presentations, which were moved to the museum's lecture hall. In 1985, Opera Atelier was officially born, and Pynkoski and Zingg prepared to mount full-scale productions.

While Opera Atelier and the School of Atelier Ballet are separate entities, they are, explains Pynkoski, very much dependent on each other. "Many of the children trained at the school have gone on to become professional dancers, touring internationally with Opera Atelier," he points out, "and the Dance Through Time program features performers from both."

NATHANIEL KOZLOW ISN'T ALONE in his view that Pynkoski and Zingg have made a great contribution to opera and dance, training young dancers, offering tremendous performance opportunities, breathing life into wonderful neglected works, and enriching Canada's cultural life. "They are truly remarkable people," Kozlow says. "Today, when it comes to baroque opera, the world looks to Canada and Opera Atelier."

Photography: Portrait of Jeannette Zingg and Marshall Pynkoski by John Hryniuk. The balance of photos are by Bruce Zinger and Laird Mackintosh, courtesy of Opera Atelier.