Theresa, you are an alumna of the Mozarteum University and completed your studies in scenography in May 2024. What does your everyday life look like, and what has changed professionally since you graduated?
Theresa: I am now the production manager for costumes at the Bregenz Festival for the lake production. So I travel back and forth a lot – between Vorarlberg and Vienna, where I live and work on smaller projects in advertising as a set designer and costume designer. And now I get to do costume design again at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, a task I am very much looking forward to.
Lena, you are in your fourth year of studying scenography: which aspects of your studies do you particularly enjoy? What do you think is special about this course?
Lena: The combination of theory and practice is probably what attracts people to the Mozarteum University. What makes it special is the university's support for collaboration between directors, set designers and costume designers, who often join forces with the various music departments to create diverse projects and ensembles that extend beyond the university setting. This lays the foundation for artistic creation while still a student.
Your current joint project is Benjamin Britten's ‘The Rape of Lucretia’ with the opera class of Gernot Sahler (musical director) and Alexander von Pfeil (stage director). It deals with rape, expressions of supposed male superiority and power. What is your personal approach to this topic?
Lena: My personal approach to this topic lies in being a woman myself. Looking at Lucretia through a magnifying glass, ‘The Rape of Lucretia’ is a contemporary sketch of the situation of women, even more than 2000 years after the founding of Rome. We try to keep the women's movement alive in the modern age through various approaches and to re-evaluate traditional gender roles with works such as ‘The Rape of Lucretia’. We continue to explore this historical subject in the context of the women's movement as an ongoing examination of how female identity and voice are negotiated in our society. With this approach, the question quickly arose for the stage: how can Lucretia break out of this rigid framework? Perhaps the answer lies not in the historical moment itself, but in its reconstruction from a contemporary perspective.
When you approach new projects and content, how do you manage to create moods through costumes and stage elements? Do you apply what you learned in your training directly?
Lena: Approaching the content of new projects can be done in many different ways. It's a very broad spectrum – from research reading (news, literature-related content, film and television, etc.) to iconic representations in the visual arts, i.e. in museums or architecture. Identifying a motif that is dealt with in the material (theatre, opera, etc.) is crucial for setting the basic mood in the stage or costume design. In ‘The Rape of Lucretia’, it was important to me to address the instrumentalisation of the female body and to place Lucretia herself in a setting of social inequality that not only enables sexual violence, but also systematically causes it. Lucretia is not an isolated case, but a symptom of a system that sees the female body as the bearer of male honour and social order – women remain a field of social control and symbolic power. With this as a starting point, the aim was to create a mood throughout the space that shows, on the one hand, who can feel safe and, on the other, who lives under threat.
Theresa: A character's costume can be seen as an extension of that character. I think it should convey their inner self to the outside world and convey a feeling or a certain impression at first glance. In ‘The Rape of Lucretia’, for example, Lena and I want to use the stage space and the costumes to highlight and clearly visualise the social structures that Lena has described. The costumes will emphasise the characters' positions of power. For example, the young servant Lucia wears a cotton apron that binds her in multiple ways. Prince Tarquinius wears higher-quality fabrics that are elaborately trimmed with lace. The use of different fabric qualities and colours, which are either bright or muted, helps to emphasise the characters' positions of power or oppression.
The setting of Britten's opera is 500 BC, making it very old. The portrait of the customs of society at that time is questionable. How does this theme affect you today as people who are read as female?
Lena: ‘The Rape of Lucretia’ deals with patriarchal power relations and how they continue to have an impact, especially today. As a person who is read as female, or even as a person who is not read as female, the question arises as to why narratives such as sexual violence, loss of honour and social exclusion are so strongly based on the guilt or purity of women. A reflection on seeing this material as a mirror in order to share in self-determination and social responsibility.
Theresa: ‘The Rape of Lucretia’ asks why female-read individuals still take on guilt and shame for the actions of others, or seek it within themselves – even when they have been deliberately and recklessly harmed. A change in social thinking is still necessary here. This question is still topical and relevant today, some 2000 years later, as we have seen in the case of Gisèle Pelicot. To quote Gisèle Pelicot: ‘The blame must shift sides.’
In your opinion, is the task of raising awareness and achieving a ‘learning effect’ that encourages people to question things particularly important in the context of art universities when it comes to such highly controversial topics?
Lena: Questioning things is very important beyond the university context in order to become aware of one's position, one's own actions and the associated effects. At the Mozarteum University, students not only learn how to perform, but above all we explore the question of ‘Why?’. This kind of learning requires discussion, friction, a change of perspective and confrontation – raising and sharpening awareness.
Theresa: I see one of the main tasks of opera itself as questioning things, placing them in a new context and linking them to one's own actions – and thereby hopefully initiating social change or at least a rethinking in one mind or another. Opera touches and moves people through the images it creates with stage, costume and music, and takes up themes that – then as now, whether in 500 BC or in the present day – raise social questions that need to be questioned. Very often, the themes are still relevant today. The fact that we have the opportunity to explore all these aspects in a university setting and to realise our own ideas and projects is a wonderful opportunity offered to us by the Mozarteum University. Successful completion of the Erasmus+ research project ‘Online Choirs’
