THE JUILLIARD SCHOOL

APR 2016

Conductor: David Stern
Set Design: Grace Laubacher
Lighting Design: Anshuman Bhatia
Costume Design: Moria Clinton
Choreographer: Sean McKnight & Adam Cates
Photos: Richard Termine

Cast: Miles Mykkanen/Christine Taylor Price/Liv Redpath/Onay Köse/Theo Hoffman/Kara Sainz/Avery Amereau/Caitlin Redding/Alex Raskazoff/Sam Levine/Fan Jia/Thesele Kemane/Kelsey Lauritano/Christine Oh/Sophia Kaminski/Alex McKissick

A marriage of opposites, Die Zauberflöte doesn’t fit neatly inside any traditional boxes.

Vaudeville and spiritual quest, ethereal but familiar, populated with moms who are also queens and birds who are also men, spaces aglow with fires that instantaneously flood with water, Mozart’s Enlightenment masterpiece touches our hearts by presenting the panoply of human possibility.

I wanted the costumes to expose, rather than hide, the humanity of each character. I wanted to see the Queen and Sarastro struggle with their problems, to divest them of golden robes and mountainous headdresses. The designers and I took inspiration from the bird and planetary imagery in Joseph Cornell’s boxes, Joseph Campbell’s work on the hero’s journey, and Karl Jung’s alchemical images from Edward Edinger’s book Mystery of the Coniunctio. The space is loosely based on research about Masonic lodges in New England, and the natural elements we portrayed come from that region as well.