Ginanne Brownell Mitic

Checking her meticulous notes that list the fittings and alterations that are needed, Ballo explained that she had written that the piece, made from fragile Indian silk, would also need new binding. Dotted across other parts of the workshop were 14 or so of her co-workers, all of them women, fixing frayed hemlines, adding sequins to bodices, and ironing and steaming pieces once they had been mended and were ready to be checked by a supervisor.

They had seven days at most to get all the costumes for the chorus, principals, actors, dancers and children fitted and ready before dress rehearsals. Velvet brocade jackets, flouncy chemises and monks’ robes with rope belts also were lined up on a rack outside the workshop for last-minute fixes for the revival of the ballet “Romeo and Juliet,” whose dress rehearsal was that day.

“So ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is on stage right now, the first time they are all in costume, so we will be dealing with that later today, going down to take any notes from stage with any running problems,” said Elizabeth King, the head of the revival workroom. “We are also fitting ‘Andrea Chénier’ and ‘Billy Budd’ and still fitting a little bit of ‘Faust.’ So there are usually four productions in different stages that we are working on at the same time.”

The revival department devotes its time to ballet and opera productions that have been performed before, like the Nicholas Georgiadis-designed “Romeo and Juliet,” for which some of the original costumes from 1965 are still being used. The entire costume department, which works on more than 5,000 pieces each season, has 110 full-time staff members and up to 80 freelancers, spread out across almost all floors of the opera house in Covent Garden, from the stock room, pattern room, and the men’s and ladies’ workroom (which focus on new production designs) to the dye room, wig room, shoe room, hats, jewelry and makeup.

During the current season, the Royal Opera House will present 21 opera and 12 ballet productions on the main stage and six operas and 10 ballets in the Linbury Theater, including some from visiting companies, so the many hands of the costume department are rarely idle.

For a new production, the planning team can be booked up to five years in advance. The costume department, overseen by Fay Fullerton, usually starts work about 18 months before the debut, when the designer and director or choreographer have a good outline of the look and concepts for the costumes, sets and props.

“There is never like ‘Oh, it is not possible,’” said Fullerton, who has worked for the opera house since 1977. “It’s more like ‘OK, we have never done anything like this before, and now we have to think how we are going to do that.’ You can always find a way.”

After an initial meeting, a supervisor is assigned from the costume department who, along with the designer of the production, formulates a “bible,” a thick black binder stuffed with all the elements for the show, including fabric swatches, bits of costume jewelry, notes, measurements, sketches, and the names of the singers and dancers in each role.

The bibles served not only as the main reference point for productions that are newly being mounted for the season, including Richard Jones’ take on the opera “Katya Kabanova” that had its debut in February. Later, they serve as guides for revivals of those operas and ballets. (On very big productions, they start designing and sewing the costumes about nine months in advance, though multiple-act works such as “Swan Lake” and “Sleeping Beauty” take about a year.)

In a bay filled with racks of completed costumes for the revival of the 2015 production of “Andrea Chénier,” which opens May 20, bookshelves were full of recent and past bibles for shows including “Swan Lake,” “The Magic Flute,” “The Nutcracker” and “Frankenstein.”

“They are the thing you live off with a production, and there are some beautiful ones,” said Lorna Robinson, the costume department’s head of workrooms and storage, turning the pages of the “Frankenstein” binder, which featured stunning hand painted drawings by the Scottish designer John MacFarlane. “They are just Rembrandts to me.”

Not all of the costumes can be made in house because of time, staffing and budgets; some pieces come from online sites or specialty shops, or freelancers are hired to make pieces elsewhere. If a designer has a certain print or pattern in mind but it cannot be found, or if there is a revival and the costume needs to be fixed but the pattern is no longer available, the department has a printer that re-creates a pattern on fabric and creates effects like embroidery.

Costume departments of major ballet and opera houses all over the world are often in touch with one another, sharing tips and techniques, in large part because so many coproductions are staged.

“We all ping each other and say, ‘Have you heard of this?’ or ‘Is there anything new that you developed on this fabric or this fastening or this boning,’” Fullerton said. “Everything is moving in the costume world, almost as quickly as mobile phones.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/arts/costumes-royal-opera-house-london.html" id="a24a40f9-6de7-3130-ae65-064cfb46aaaf">The New York Times</a>.

LONDON — On a recent spring morning, the Royal Opera House’s revival workroom, which is part of the costume department, was a hive of activity. Amedine Ballo, one of the revival workroom technicians, was hand-sewing gold thread onto a burgundy and pink chorus costume for the opera “Faust,” opened this week, because part of it had worn away.

Putting the Dress in Dress Rehearsals

But in the new vehicle, said Lenaerts, principal harpist of the Vienna Philharmonic, they could take out a middle seat and push the harp inside.

“I was lucky my parents didn’t say, ‘Sorry, Anneleen, just choose the saxophone,'” she said with a laugh over lunch at a cafe across the street from Musikverein, where the musicians were on a break before an almost monthlong tour of Japan and China in November. “I may be one of the only harpists in the world who does not have a driver’s license because when other people were on school holidays learning to drive, I was traveling so much.”

It’s unlikely that Lenaerts, 31, will be making a New Year’s resolution to get that license because there simply isn’t room in her busy schedule. In 2018 she has crisscrossed the globe, performing with the Vienna Philharmonic and playing solo concerts in places as diverse as Bruges, Belgium, and Bogotá, Colombia.

Gustavo Dudamel, the rock star musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, hand-picked Lenaerts to play with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra when he was its guest conductor on a tour across Europe in September. That same month, Kalevi Aho’s “Mearra,” which the composer wrote especially for her, had its Finnish premiere.

“Anneleen is a real virtuoso of her instrument,” Aho wrote in an email. “Her technical virtuosity, her kind personality and her great flexibility in different musical styles are, in my opinion, the reasons why she is as a harpist so in demand.”

Growing up in the Flemish town of Peer, Lenaerts took up the piano at the age of 8. The next year, when the conductor of their local symphonic wind orchestra, Koninklijke Harmonie van Peer, decided he wanted a harpist, he chose her for the instrument.

“I wanted to play the oboe or the clarinet so I could have a little case to go to rehearsals,” she said. “Usually girls choose the harp because they have seen ‘The Nutcracker’ and they like ballet, but what I knew about the harp was that it gave you calluses on your fingers. I was not a typical girly-girl, so the harp did not attract me because it was so poetic, I just gave it a go.”

It soon became very obvious to all who heard her play that Lenaerts was a gifted musician; from 1997 to 2010 she won more than 20 prizes and awards in international competitions. By 15 she was working professionally and, after completing her undergraduate and master’s degrees in three years at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, she went to Paris to train with the solo harpist Isabelle Perrin, all the while continuing to perform with orchestras across Europe.

“I realized how amazingly talented she was and how quickly she could not only learn something but also understand it, which is more difficult,” said Perrin, who met Lenaerts when she was 12. “I would say she is one of the top five players in the world, but she has kept that kindness and openness that is so rare when people get to that level.”

In 2010, while in Munich performing with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under conductor Mariss Janson, Lenaerts learned there would soon be an opening for a harpist with the Vienna Philharmonic. “I was very happy being a soloist, and I never wanted to enter an orchestra,” she said, recalling her hesitation before she decided to go for the tryouts.

“I was ‘No. 9’ for the audition, and it was behind a curtain. I was thinking, ‘If this does not go well, I will just go back to Belgium and nobody will ever know.'” She won the audition — at just 23 — and moved to Vienna the next autumn.

“Since her engagement as a member of the Vienna Philharmonic, Anneleen has proven to be an outstanding musician with great excellence,” Daniel Froschauer, the chairman of the orchestra and its first violinist, wrote in an email. “She is a wonderful colleague.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/arts/music/anneleen-lenaerts-top-harpist-vienna-philharmonic-.html" id="02bb2853-a3fc-3911-a35b-298bdc2338b8">The New York Times</a>.

VIENNA — Not long after Anneleen Lenaerts took up the harp at the age of 9, her parents had to buy a new car. It was a pragmatic purchase because their old family vehicle simply did not have enough room to comfortably accommodate the budding musician and her bulky instrument as they drove around her native Belgium for classes, concerts and competitions.

A Harpist Who's in High Demand

<h1>LONDON — Philip Hewat-Jaboor, chairman of the Masterpiece London Art Fair, can pinpoint the exact moment when he first became interested in art and objets d’art.</h1>

When he was a young boy in the early 1960s, he said, his grandfather Sir Alfred Aykroyd, who was a serious collector of both Chinese ceramics and British sporting paintings, showed him “a 17th-century tou ts’ai enameled beaker, which is about 2 inches high.” It was, at that time, “one of the most valuable bits of porcelain you could have.”

Sir Alfred let his grandson handle the red, green and yellow piece painted with four dragon medallions with sprays of lotus emerging from their mouths and foliage. He explained the glazes as the child turned it over in his hands, feeling its heft.

“That was the only moment when he melted, when he started talking about his collection,” Hewat-Jaboor said. “That got me hooked.”

That experience not only led Hewat-Jaboor to a lifelong love of collecting — he worked for several years at Sotheby’s before starting his own art advisory business — but also reinforced in him the importance of getting children exposed to and interested in art at a young age.

Masterpiece is doing its part. The fair has hired the consultants Oppidan Education to help create workshops for children ages 4 to 14 as well as talks about the lives of artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Salvador Dalí. Children will also have the opportunity to make their own pieces of art, and there will be half-hour tours of the fair for visitors ages 6 to 13 as part of the activities for Family Day on Sunday.

“Education is incredibly important and part of the ethos of our fair,” Hewat-Jaboor said. “We have a sort of duty to do this, apart from the fact that this is tremendous fun and tremendously exciting to see people of any age group, particularly young ones, get thrilled and interested in something they may not have looked at before.”

Other art fairs, biennales and triennales across the globe are also offering more programming geared toward young people.

The Artissima art fair in Turin, Italy, in November introduced the Artissima Junior program, in which children designed a tapestry with Alek O, the Argentine artist.

The program was a success, and the fair plans to expand it this year.

At the recent Art Basel fair in Switzerland, there were not only tours of the Unlimited section of the fair specifically for children but also a Young Artists Studio section, where young people could experience everything from making their own geometric figures to discovering color with Brazilian artist Inés Lombardi.

The Aichi Triennale in Japan, which will open Aug. 1, will include a program at which artists will work with young people in schools across the region to build a cardboard playground that will later be installed within one of the Triennale’s sites.

The Venice Biennale has a sizable number of activities for children, including thematic workshops on subjects like the role art plays in nature, technology and philosophy.

Since taking over her role in 2009 as the director of the Istanbul Biennial (opening Sept. 14), Bige Orer has focused a lot of attention on programming for children, including publishing in 2015 a history of the biennial geared toward them. This year, with the event’s theme, the “Seventh Continent” of plastic waste, the focus of much of the children’s programming will be on the role between art and ecology.

“It is really important to create a space for children for creativity and discovery and to use it for raising awareness about art and the world around them,” Orer said. “They are the future generations of our society, so either they will become makers of art or they will become the audience of art.”

For Ilaria Bonacossa, director of Artissima, the idea to inaugurate a children’s program last year — in collaboration with Turin’s soccer team, Juventus, which brought players to the fair — grew out of the fact that many parents brought their kids in previous years but many galleries gave off a “don’t touch” vibe that did not make young people feel very welcome.

“It was the biggest surprise, because everyone at the fair in the beginning were saying ‘we don’t want it close to us’ and ‘it’s going to be a madhouse,’ but in the meantime it was the quietest corner of the fair with the kids super-engaged and concentrated,” Bonacossa said. “The artist loved it, the work that came out was beautiful, people from the fair were coming to look, and the kids enjoyed it a lot.”

Daiya Aida, curator of the learning section for the Aichi Triennale, said that the function of art was to make the invisible visible and that children’s minds had different ways of unlocking and thinking about wider concepts brought out in artworks.

And, he said, “I think that art also needs children.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/arts/children-art-masterpiece-london.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Global art fairs extend a welcome to children

Sir Alfred let his grandson handle the red, green and yellow piece painted with four dragon medallions with sprays of lotus emerging from their mouths and foliage. He explained the glazes as the child turned it over in his hands, feeling its heft.

Her husband, Vaclav Litvan, whom she met when they were students at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts and who is also a sculptor, sometimes works with her on the technical side of her pieces, and he often helps install her works in museums and galleries for shows.

Her aunt, Zdenka Kucerova, who is a beekeeper back in Hulacova’s home village of Kasejovice (about a 90-minute drive southwest of Prague), has also had a hand in helping the 34-year-old artist with her conceptual art over the years. They designed a way for Hulacova to put some of her works, with hollowed-out middles, on top of beehives so the bees over time created intricate honeycombs inside the cavities of her sculptures. Hulacova — a keen environmentalist — and her aunt also made sure that once the sculptures were removed, there was little disruption to the bees and hives.

Meanwhile, her father, Josef Hulac, a furniture restorer and farmer, and her brother, Jan Hulac, have done intarsia (a form of wood inlay similar to marquetry) work for a few of her installations. A wooden skateboard and table, where they used 15 types of wood including cherry, oak, mahogany and ash, were part of the installation “Graceful Ride,” which was exhibited last year at Kunstraum, a London gallery.

“They enjoyed doing it,” Hulacova said, adding that she paid her father and brother for their work. “Especially my father, because he could finally return to his best techniques, which was a cherry on top for him.”

At Art Basel Hong Kong, Hulacova’s work “Pathetic Poetic,” an installation that includes not only her own sculpted concrete pieces but also her father and brother’s skateboard and table (and their intarsia wooden bookshelves), will be featured in the Discoveries sector of the fair. It is something of a coup for Hulacova, as well as for her gallery, Hunt Kastner (the first Czech gallery to show at Art Basel Hong Kong), because it is a chance for her work to be seen by collecting and curating circles across Asia. Though her work has been featured at other big-name art fairs including Frieze London in 2017, she has not had much of a presence outside Europe, though she will also take part in the Aichi Triennale in Japan starting in August.

However, Hulacova has increasingly become a name not only in her own country, winning Czech Artist of the Year 2017, but also across the Continent as well. She has been featured in a number of European solo exhibitions, including one in Paris at the Fondation Louis Vuitton from October 2018 to January 2019.

She has also participated in a several group exhibitions including, also in Paris, the Palais de Tokyo’s “Another Banana Day for the Perfect Fish” and in last year’s Baltic Triennial in Lithuania where her “Underworld Upside Down” received much critical praise. Another group show, “Entomos: Hulacova-Keresztes-Janousek,” closed this month at the Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace in Prague.

Adeline Ooi, the Asia director for Art Basel, said the whole point of the Discoveries sector was to introduce up-and-coming artists to a new broader Asian market.

“When we discussed the project, it jumped out,” she said of Hulacova’s “Pathetic Poetic” installation. “It stood apart from everybody else in its own way. It rang with a certain kind of honesty, and it was distinct, and you could not say no to this.”

As a child, Hulacova loved to model in clay, and her father sometimes let her practice carving in his studio. As a teenager, she was sent to school to learn traditional woodworking. While she enjoyed the experience, she realized that her real love was more contemporary, so at 18 she moved to Prague to study art — something that her family supported but did not really understand at first.

“They didn’t know that art can be a serious job,” the shy artist said with a chuckle. “It was quite funny when I found out that I would go on a residency to Strasbourg and my grandfather started to cry because he could not believe that someone would pay for me to be staying somewhere.”

While at art school, she found she was interested in juxtaposing not only sculptural styles, like classical with conceptual, but also working with different materials, aspects that she experiments with in her current work. However, a number of her professors felt that her work was too provincial and naïve.

“They didn’t understand it,” said Kacha Kastner, one of two North American expat co-founders of Hunt Kastner. “In the Czech Republic, there is a strong post-conceptual bent and at that time no one was making figurative sculpture, and so I think it took longer for people to jump on the bandwagon. But maybe that is a good thing.”

What makes Hulacova’s work stand out, say critics and curators who have worked with her, is that combination of seemingly incongruous themes, concepts and materials that on paper seem like a bizarre mishmash yet somehow, once combined, create a powerful and stimulating body of work. They include brutalist architecture and Central European folklore to Greco-Roman mythology, surrealism, futurism and science fiction — all represented through things like wood, concrete, honeycomb and digital prints.

“Through this ambiguous yet playful mix of inspirations, techniques and materials,” Yoann Gourmel, one of the curators of “Another Banana Day for the Perfect Fish,” wrote in an email, “she successfully merges in her own distinctive language the local with the global, the past with the present, the organic with the digital, without any distinction or sense of hierarchy.”

The combination, much of which Hulacova said comes out of her anger over things she finds unjust, including issues around loss of animal and insect habitats, often also mixes the optimistic with the pessimistic, so while some find her works grotesque and disturbing, others find them playful and beguiling.

“People do not realize her works have a deep social commentary,” Kastner said. “When she is angry, she sees a situation, like problems with the environment that people are not addressing, and she feels she has to do something.”

Her art must be touching a nerve. “There is a wave of tensions in her work that make it absolutely mesmerizing,” said Vincent Honore, who curated last year’s Baltic Triennial. “She is an extraordinary artist.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="7b1009b0-07d8-409e-9c98-503daefbcf77" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/archives/art-basel-hong-kong-anna-hulacova.html">The New York Times</a>.

A Czech artist sends her message to Hong Kong

PRAGUE — For Czech sculptor Anna Hulacova, sometimes art is a family affair.

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Ginanne Brownell Mitic

Articles written by the author

Putting the Dress in Dress Rehearsals

A Harpist Who's in High Demand

Global art fairs extend a welcome to children

A Czech artist sends her message to Hong Kong