Dressing the “Vixen”: Meet the College of Music costume shop!
Ann Piano walks me around the Imig Music Building, she opens doors into rooms I’ve never seen. Inside, racks of colorful fabric, shelves upon shelves of shoes, bins of belts and the ghosts of characters who had come before.
Piano, the college’s costume coordinator/designer + shop manager, joined the College of Music full-time in 2021. She and her team help advise the selection of opera and musical productions; then the creative work begins.
“Once the shows have been selected, I read them,” Piano says. “I research past productions. I look to see if it’s a show we should be trying to put into our stock—like, are those costume pieces useful? Can I reuse these things many times over the years?”
This spring, the costume team is creating ensembles for “,” a 20th-century opera by Leoš Janáček presented by ourEklund Opera Program, April 16-19. The three-act opera explores the cycle of life through the fairy tale setting of a forest and the turning of its seasons.
The show features two “worlds” in its cast of characters—the human world consisting of roles like the Forester, the Innkeeper and the Parson; and the animal world including the Fox, the Dog and the titular Vixen. In Piano’s mind, the humans are inspired by traditional Bavarian fashion but with a colorful, patterned twist not usually seen in this show.
“A lot of times they make the humans sort of dark, gray and drab and that’s not my speed,” she says. “This is a life-affirming story, right? Let’s let the humans be colorful and bright. The stories are fairy tales and they are from that world—I thought we should be representing that.”
For the animals, the team is using earthy tones—browns, greens and rusts. To disguise the human actor underneath, Piano plans to use an abundance of textures and ruffles.
“It’s like this high fashion concept of textures and avant-garde touches to represent the animals. We’re disguising the shape of a human but not making them fully an animal.”
Along with Piano, the costume team includes Wardrobe Coordinator Carolyn Miller and Costume Shop Assistant Nia Quan, plus a few student positions, who costume some five shows a year across the college’s opera and musical theatre programs. For some shows, the team rents the bulk of the garments from another company, then creates pieces to fill in the gaps—as for “Oklahoma!” in March. Others, like “Vixen,” are fully imagined and executed by our team.
Piano’s excitement about the designs and vision for “Vixen” is palpable. She says one of her favorite parts of her role is the fittings—getting the student performers into the costumes and witnessing the final piece of the puzzle falling into place.
“They’ll try on two or three things and their faces just light up, and you know you found the right piece that makes them feel good to wear,” she says. “I think that’s really my job. I storytell a little bit with the arc and the color story—but really, my goal is to make the performers feel like they’re that character. That they can embody the character, look good and feel good about that.”
Due to significant campus activity and noise impacts on April 17 and 18 from a large university‑hosted event, several performances of “” have changed.The dates and times currently listed on reflect the updated schedule.
Photo credit: Sarita Narayanswamy