Inventive Costume for Madam Butterfly

I love theater, which includes grand opera. Theater was my sewing training ground. So when my husband and I went to see Madam Butterfly at the Washington Opera the costumes caught my attention and threw me off at the same time. This is a very serious and sad story and the costumes almost looked like cartoons or clown costumes.

Each act started with kimonos in all those bright graphic prints hanging in front of the curtain. sorry ... Hard to see with the lighting here.

Then the singers came on stage and they were wearing kimonos similar to the ones hanging in front of the curtain. And particularly weird were the suits of the two western characters, Pinkerton and Sharpless. The sort of western style suits they wore were also made of all different fabrics and colors. This didn't work for me.

Then I realized the costume designer, Jun Kaneko, was the artist who made all these fun  ceramic bears I'd seen a few months back in the hallways of Kennedy Center.

Don't they look like the kimonos?

Here he is next to some of his really large sculptures.

So, he is Japanese and was asked to design the sets for Madam Butterfly. But, after he started working on the sets he asked to do the costumes, too. This is a very conceptual production.

Before he started designing the sets and costumes he went all over the United State and saw every production of Madam Butterfly he could for a year

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Here is the set alone. This stays up the entire opera with only a few screens being pulled in and out, sometimes with very interesting projected images. This set really pulls you into the story. It's a bit hypnotic actually.

The screen on the right had stripes and dots (do you see a theme here?) that represented the night sky. The screen on the left was pulled in and out many times. It represented the walls of a Japanese house and was used with great affect for shadow drama.

Another very cool thing were these mute actors dressed all in black with the squared off headdresses. They were called upon to be all sorts of things during the opera, such as a table, a servant or someone to deliver a prop. What ever was needed.

So, I said this was a really sad story. Actually if you know the story of the Broadway musical Miss Saigon, it is the same story as Madam Butterfly. She kills herself at the end. Here was another very effective use of the screens with projections. As she stabs herself the red dot on this screen starts to drip and flow like wet paint or blood. Very powerful along with beautiful singing and lush music.

This link will take you to a short synopsis of the opera plot.

I started wondering how the story of this opera came about. The program said it was partially based on an auto biographical story written by a French sailor in the 1880's. I found it on line. The link below will take you to the site where it can be read for free in several different formants. It describes 19th Century Japan from the eyes of westerner ... very interesting.
 Read Madame Chrysantheme 

But, this is a sewing blog ... so back to the costumes.
As I said, I didn't know what to make of them at first. They didn't seem to suit the story, but by the end of the first act I fell in love with them, except for the western men's suits. See how this kimono has one long sleeve and one short one? I like the inventiveness and it kind of represents Butterfly's confusion, how she is living in Japan, but thinks of herself as the wife of an American man.

If you are interested to see more photos from the Washington Opera's costume shop click on the link below.

To see more costume shop photos, read the Washington Opera's Blog post about making these costumes by clicking this sentence.

There are many different kinds of costuming and all is creative. But this is the kind I admire the most.  Good costumes play such an important part of good theater!