© Ilse Ruppert
As a costume designer, I understand my job in two ways: on the one hand, I have to develop a visual language with clearly legible characters that support the vision of the directing team and reinforce the plot and role work; on the other hand, I want to offer the audience visual stimuli, inspire and entertain them through my craft. For OPER OTZE AXT, I was asked to design punk costumes for opera singers (or opera costumes for punks?). The East German punk legend ‘Otze’, his five doppelgangers (the archetypal roles of Magician, Shadow, Thug, Injured Animal and Unofficial Employee), his ‘Vadder’ and the citizens of the GDR (as a choir) were to be outfitted for three different musical theatre stages in (West) Germany. In the following lines I will now explain some aspects and backgrounds of my design concept for OPER OTZE AXT.
The work began with research into the ‘fashion’ of punks in the GDR, although the term ‘fashion’ should be used with caution at this point. For the early punks, dressing was the opposite of fashion, a gesture of rejection of conformity, of resistance, of the search for individuality. Nevertheless, it is known that Eastern punks imitated the aesthetics of Western punk movements. For the strictly regulated mores of the GDR, where fashion was organised in five-year plans, this represented a form of criticism of the system. In addition, everything had to be made by the punks themselves: everyday clothes were re-sewn, dyed, discoloured, sprayed and labelled. The GDR punks dressed in dark suit trousers or work trousers, often with braces or a high-water cut, combined with trench coats, chequered or dark jackets and rare leather jackets. White shirts with thin ties or self-painted T-shirts were common. They wore safety pins, chains made from toilet flushers, dog strangles or razor blades as anti-jewellery. Their hairstyles were short and shaggy, and their faces were often decorated with black lips, red cat eyes or painted scars. In the beginning, punks dressed quite neatly, albeit with daring styling; later, the ‘classic’ punk look emerged: dirty, torn, stained, patched. Badges, armbands and lettering on clothing displayed band names such as Sex Pistols or Clash as well as political slogans. (Source: Michael Horschig: In der DDR hat es nie Punks gegeben. In: ‘Wir wollen immer artig sein…’ Berlin 1999, pp. 10-22).
During my research, an increasingly urgent question arose: If costume usually transfers the norm of a culture onto the stage, how do you portray a part of society that rejects the system and lives in resistance to it without disarming that in an aesthetic formalisation, turning it into a dead symbol? How can you create costumes that embody the aesthetics of punk in the moment, before it is assimilated and becomes a fashion? How can the interaction between fashion, resistance and the search for one’s own individuality be represented in costume?
The costumes were made almost exclusively by selecting, adapting and combining costume items from the stock of the theatres with which the DDO cooperated as part of NOperas! On the one hand, this way of working is true to the punk ethic, which positions itself as critical of consumption and in which creativity and self-expression emerge from the transformation of found material. In addition, the creation of costumes from the various inventories and in close collaboration with the theatres’ wardrobe masters is a sustainable practice because it conserves material resources, saves costs and strengthens social relationships.
The costumes were therefore created from a mixture of theatre finds and everyday clothing. Relatively quickly, I came up with the idea of experimenting with baroque-style theatre costumes. Baroque costumes are not only colourful, opulent, pompous and decidedly ‘theatrical’ – and therefore perfectly suited to portraying ‘costumedness’. The choice of this period was a metaphor for a turning point, an era of upheaval, crisis and reorganisation. In the early modern period, feudalism collapsed and the free market took its first forms, the power of the church was shaken, modern science and democracy emerged, while wars and social upheavals raged: between the Thirty Years‘ War and the Peasants’ Wars. In the 1980s, the socialist dictatorship of the GDR collapsed, the political system changed from one-party rule to democracy, and capitalism replaced the planned economy. Many people in the GDR experienced the upheaval as existential uncertainty, just as people in the early modern era believed they were close to the end of history. In Stotternheim, a portal opens up between two epochs, a connection between the early modern era and the fall of communism. On stage, the Otze lookalikes repeatedly don and doff baroque jackets and waistcoats. The scenic moves activate new plots – a punk concert, the first visit to the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the idea of patricide. They wear black combat boots with steel toe caps and dirty work trousers, their faces are expressively made up with thick eyeliner and dark colour gradients. Meanwhile, the chorus, in grey work clothes, with light-coloured powder, black contact lenses and cheap wigs, portrays the uniformity of mass society from the perspective of the punks. In the third act, shortly before the Wall is opened, the magician announces: ‘Come and see. / The wheel of history has turned for the last time.’ The image of the wheel appears in the costume design in the form of a figure-of-eight ruff, which is worn by all the actors – a baroque fashion accessory that unmistakably symbolises that time of transition. Luther, Otze, preaching and performing, the baroque and the turning point…
In OPER OTZE AXT, historical costumes were transferred to a foreign sign system, where they encountered work clothes, used fabrics and improvised additions. This refraction posed the question of the ‘costume-ness’ of fashion and the performative act of dressing – not only in punk, but also in relation to the main character Otze and his era. At the same time, there was a meta-reflection on theatrical means and on how roles can be told visually across epochs. But what does this aesthetic mean in today’s political climate? Has the wheel of history turned again after all? Are we living in a new baroque era, in a turning point in which systems are crumbling and ideologies are being overtaken, in which a new age is being heralded while the old one has not yet disappeared? And if so, how will we dress for it?
