Astrakhan Opera and Ballet Theater
2023

Composer: Gaetano Donizetti
Director: Alexey Smirnov
Stage and costume designer: Julia Vetrova

Every work I do on an opera is a huge joyful event for me, because, frankly speaking, opera is my favorite theatrical genre. Every rehearsal with the orchestra, choir and soloists is an incredible pleasure. Of course, the specifics of creating sets for opera are very close to me, I love working with large forms, in a large format, where the decoration works in parallel with the music, moves to the beat or separately to the beat, serves not only as a background, but is also part of the musical composition.
I came up with this opera, inspired by Italian television of the 1960s, the amazing images of TV presenters and spectators in the studio of that time, the work was incredibly fun, especially on the costumes, the fashion of those years was bright, eccentric and sometimes shocking. We also have the moment of the use of a distant image by the television studio of The Murray Franklin Show from the movie "Joker", the image of this studio was taken by me deliberately as a reference, this quote in the opera is not accidental, it was used deliberately as a technique of postmodern theater. Of course, we made the studio not identical to the original, but made it using the collage method, which sometimes gives the scenery additional parallel meanings and can also be counterpoint.