Voronezh Chamber Theater
2019

Author: Mikhail Bulgakov
Director: Mikhail Bychkov
Costume designer: Julia Vetrova

I love this performance very much, when I was first offered to do it, I was delighted, because it was incredible happiness for me to dream up in costumes on the theme of Moliere and his time. I wanted to try to combine elements of costumes from Moliere's time and modern neutral elements of clothing, thereby I wanted to create a timeless solution for the characters. I used the collage method in my work and thought through each character in detail, by combining incongruous elements; by the way, this is one of my favorite techniques in my work.
After the sketches were ready, I started choosing fabrics, this is the most difficult and my favorite part of the work, because the choice of fabric completely determines how the suit will look. I spend a lot of time on this stage of work, first I go around all the fabric stores with my sketches, cut off small scraps of fabric as samples, then lay it out on the sketches like a puzzle and choose the combinations I need.
Then I make technical drawings of costumes, and then consult with workshops on which fabrics will best convey the cut I need. I can talk forever about my work on costumes because it is a very creative and exciting process that I simply adore.
In this performance, it was also very important for us to see how the fabric shows itself in the light, and for this I brought whole rolls of fabric from the store to the theater and draped them directly on the stage in order to see all the nuances of the material. An important detail of our performance was the costume of King Louis, it was made from pieces of gold mirror plastic of different shapes and all the actors, the audience, the stage, and the lighting equipment were reflected in it, and he himself glowed like the sun.