Night flight
Set and costumes, 2012Akademietheater im Prinzregententheater, Munich, Germany
Responsibilities
Concept design
Scheme design
Detail design
Prop selection and sourcing
Creative oversight of realisation
Collaborators
Director: Igor Pison
Dramaturg: Markus Hänsel
Musical director: Tobias Peschanel
Realisation: The set and costume workshops at the Prinzregententheater
Context
‘Night flight’ is an opera by Luigi Dallapiccolla. It is set at an airport around 1930. Commercial air travel is brand new. The airport manager, a fanatic believer in progress, pushes his employees to maximum efficiency. Even a hurricane can’t bring him to stop his well-oiled operation.
Audience
The production targeted people from Munich with an interest in politics and contemporary art and classical music.
Challenge
The set needed to communicate ideas of speed, technological triumph and fragile connections. It needed to be versatile enough to assist the performers in expressing both external action and internal emotional processes.
The costumes needed to emphasise the environment and atmosphere of the story more than its exact place in time.
Solution
I structured the performance space with frames made of corrugated steel that were interconnected with elastic rope. The intervention responded to both movement and atmospheric lighting and gave performers the opportunity to play with it.
In the costume design, I vaguely alluded to 1930’s air force uniforms and office fashion whilst avoiding anything that felt overly specific to the time.
