Don Quixote – Set and Costumes
Teatro dell'Opera, Rome, 2017
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The Roman Teatro dell'Opera for its 2017-2018 season presented a new production of the ballet Don Quixote, for which I created the set and costumes.
This production to a great extent was influenced by the renowned ballet dancer and choreographer, Mikhail Baryshnikov, who in his time (at the end of the '70s) created his own version of this great ballet for the American Ballet Theatre.
This is my one and only experience as a set and costume designer for the theatre. Although I have seen countless classical versions of Don Quixote and was inspired by many of them, I mainly sensed in the classical libretto, originally created in the middle of the XIX century by the French choreographer Marius Petipa, the familiar overtones of a children's book and imagined the set as a huge toy — an enormous pop-up book. I saw an opportunity to make a life-size toy paper theatre and fill it with live dancers, dressed in grotesque costumes, as is typical of children's books characters, while always keeping to a fairly accurate historical perspective.
| | The main curtain, 20 x 10 meters | |
