Ana Kuzmanic’s decadent designs for DON GIOVANNI

The riveting revival of director Robert Falls’ Don Giovanni has returned to the Lyric stage. Among the accolades the production received when it opened our 2014|15 Season, designer Ana Kuzmanic’s “richly colored, multi-textured” costumes were highlighted as standouts. From an interview in American Theatre magazine, we learn more about Kuzmanic’s process of bringing inspiration to reality.

“Opera is a very different process. I’m always blown away by how evocative the music is. When I started working on Don Giovanni, just listening to the music with closed eyes—music is the character. The libretto is very important, but I listened to it many times without even reading the libretto, and I understood everything, I knew everything. I speak Italian a little bit, but it was really the music that blew me away.”

“All designers will start accumulating imagery. But then Ana will discover some Russian Constructivist, or some Eskimo painter; she’ll bring in photographs of a German conceptual artist working on some project. She’ll bring in some bizarre detail,” director Robert Falls says.

“I also like to start drawing very early on,” Kuzmanic says. “I’ll go through series and series of sketches; each one of those drawing phases informs something—perhaps the silhouette, or just the jaggedness of the line. Some characters are jagged, some characters are smooth. Some have ridges and some are slippery.” She also likes to use collaging as a bridge between her research and her drawings. But even the final drawing, she points out, is “just the blueprint for the costume that gets built through fittings and finding fabrics.”

“There are directors who only work with certain designers,” Falls notes, “and I like to shake it up and really cast a play with designers the way you cast the actors. But I have to say, since 2005 or 2006, working with Ana, I really have gone to her most of the time. She’s one of the most extraordinary artists I’ve worked with in my career.”

Read the full interview with Ana Kuzmanic and Robert Falls in the October 2014 edition of American Theatre magazine.