Dress Rehearsals

Here are some pictures of the dress rehearsal. They are going very well, I must say I am very impressed by the quality of the making in the wardrobe here. (I hope they will be as good in Moscow). Absolutely everything is made in house, no free-lancers, as there would be in the UK. it did take a few goes to get the samples right, but once done, the costumes produced are lovely. There are 70 people working in the ateliers, apparently, so the process has been curiously remote, just meeting the head cutters and supervisors. I've not so much as visited a dressing room - not seeing anything between fittings and seeing the results on stage. But visiting the workrooms to arrange the decoration, everyone was working with broad smiles on their faces, as it was like walking into a flower market with all the bright colours that are such a part of napoli. All day colour therapy!

Sunday Morning 2

It's very, very cold here, and I didn't bring enough warm clothes, so am grateful for the long under-leggings sportif I purchased yesterday [rather expensively.] I don't know how Czech women find anything interesting to wear, apart from lots of leather. A smallish Marks and Spencer has increased the available fashion-wear by about 70%, which says it all really. Terrific shoe shops though.
This morning i decided to be a tourist for a couple of hours and visited the castle/palace/cathedral complex across the river. By 9, busloads of Japanese and German tourists were already being unloaded. i went into the cathedral with a Lenten mass going on, a huge Gothic building, but where some bishop had been unable to resist adding gold topped columns and writhing Baroque statury. The stained glass windows were really magnificent, glass-work being such a local speciality. I then went to the undercroft of Prague Castle which had an interesting display of allsorts from bronze-age burials to 16th c grave clothes, i really wanted to see the great hall above, but my ticket didn't allow. I will have to go again, then coffee overlooking the city, and so home - across the Charles Bridge.

Sunday Morning

Yesterday evening Mikael and I went to see La Clemenza di Tito at the Estates Theatre. The opera was premiered at this very theatre in 1791 with Mozart himself conducting from the piano, [though mightn't they mean harpsichord?]. How's that for history? It was terrific, we never saw the chorus, who were squashed out of sight behind the Peter Brook like white perspective box, so it became a powerful, rather modern psycho-drama concentrating on the 6 principals. the scene changes were all at the end of the tunnel, and therefore only needed to be 2 metres square...

Ballet Design

If you want to destabilize any self-satisfaction you might have about your body image try working with dancers! It's not just that they are tiny, which they are, but their fitness and grace makes them seem to belong to an entirely different species. I feel like a Labrador among Italian whippets! There's no point in bothering about it, they simply belong to a different gene pool...
Apart from the ballets which occur in operas such as Prince Igor and the Baroque dancers in Purcell's "The Fairy Queen" I have not actually designed costumes for a classical ballet before.

Napoli in Prague

I arrived in Prague for the final production week with dress rehearsals, and on February 21st, the 1st night. Therefore this blog will have quite a number of flashbacks.
We had the first dress rehearsal yesterday. The event is billed as "A Bournonville Evening" and consists of his two best known ballets, "La Sylphide" and Act 3 of Bournonville's genre ballet, "Napoli" which is essentially a 40 minute celebration of the joy of dance, without the back-story.
The evening contained another adventure, when during the big scene change Martin, the director of the Prague ballet, took us up to the roof of the theatre in the freezing moonlight, which would have made a fine set for Don Giovanni, or Tosca without any changes at all!