Opera to Costumes Get a Lift

2009-12-23 (수) 12:00:00

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By RANDY KENNEDY

NORTH BERGEN, New Jersey - In deepest urban New Jersey sits an unlikely place that might be thought of as opera heaven. Or maybe opera purgatory, a cavernous building where hundreds of pieces of fauxormolu- encrusted furniture, brass goblets, rubber plants and costumes - rack after elegant rack - end up when not in use in productions by New York City Opera, awaiting their next night on the stage.

But for many of the costumes, the ones in odd sizes or past their prime, the wait is in vain, their requiems sung. And that is where E. V. Day comes in.

Over the last several months, while the opera has been preparing to begin its new season after extensive renovations to its home at Lincoln Center, the David H. Koch Theater, Ms. Day has been given free rein to rummage through its considerable closets. An artist best known for transforming clothing into sculpture material - deconstructed dresses arrested in the act of exploding, frighteningly dissected wetsuits, G-strings arrayed in fighter-jet formations ? Ms. Day, 42, has described her work as “futurist abstract paintings in three dimensions,” and as a means of examining social constructs, particularly the roles that clothes can impose on women.

But when George Steel, the opera’s new general manager and artistic director, told Ms. Day that he was interested in commissioning her to create a temporary installation for the theater’s grand promenade space, she was quickly plunged into a world of grand fiction and high tradition in which clothes don’t just impose roles but also practically define them.

The clothes for Don
Giovanni and Mimi
live another life.

“I would be going through all these beautiful dresses that looked very similar initially, and I’d say to the costume people, ‘Who might wear this one?’ ” Ms. Day recalled recently . “And without missing a beat they’d say, ‘Oh that’s Violetta from ‘La Traviata.’ ”

The clothing that Ms. Day has transformed in her work for the opera - 13 pieces in all, which went on view to the public on November 6 and will remain in place through the fall and spring seasons, suspended among the promenade’s catwalks - is a veritable opera traditionalist’s cast of characters. There is Don Giovanni, represented by his black gloves, one flying up a cloud of a crinoline skirt like a hawk attacking a flock of doves. There is Mimi from “La Boheme,” represented by a stark-red velvet dress that is, like all of Ms. Day’s work, suspended using pieces of fishing line attached to the cloth with fishing-tackle connectors called swivel snaps; in this case the dress looks as if an elegant form of rigor mortis had set in after tuberculosis claimed its owner. There is the lacy, ethereal shell of Manon’s dress, a copy of one worn by Beverly Sills during a performance as the character in Massenet’s opera. And Cio- Cio-San’s kimono from “Madama Butterfly” is shown ascending in a kind of triumphant flight from her tragic fate.

For a sculptor whose raw material is clothing, Ms. Day said there were days, even in the dark and sometimes frigid costume building, when she felt as if she were in heaven. “This is couture,” she said, pointing out the intricate, tiny beadwork on a dress, details that would probably be lost even to operagoers in the first row. “ These are all hand-stitched. It’s an art form.” Partly because of this, many of the costumes have remained more or less intact .

In an essay she wrote to accompany this exhibition, she says that “what helped me in imagining new forms for these costumes was all the evidence of life that I found inside them: multiple alterations, perspiration stains, dirt from dragging frilly petticoats across the stage so many miles, makeup smudged around the collars and layers of tags sewn inside showing their provenance: the characters, the productions, the stages they’d played.”

“I wanted to reanimate those lives,” she added, “and give them a future form in the promenade.”

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