July 5

Storyline Research

Today I read through 6 books to find a story to base my operetta off of. I read through Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but none of those stories had enough plot twists and interesting characters to make for an interesting opera, or just a single aria for that matter. Of course there were the classics like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty in there, but those stories have been done so many times, I wanted to find something new. After skimming through the first story in Giant Tales I decided that it would be very difficult to have a giant as a protagonist onstage because I would need to use stilts or something to show the size difference and that is a hassle. Scheherezade’s Cat was basically all stories with animals as the main character which would be difficult to stage convincingly, and Akua Hawai’i didn’t have dynamic enough plots and they all took place over a course of years, where in opera the events shown are happening over the course of a few months at most. I have always been more partial to Greek myths than Norse ones, so ultimately I decided to pick a Greek myth, and I finally found a story I feel would make for a good operetta, and that would definitely have enough fodder for one juicy scene: The Judgement of Paris. You can read a short summary of it here. As the scene I choose to compose, I have decided to pick the scene where Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena all confront Paris to try to get him to choose the fairest one. This would be a quartet, which may provide some challenges, but we will cross that bridge when we get there. Now that I know what my operetta is about, I can start making moodboards and researching set and costume ideas. I am not done with the basic research yet, but I am trying to get done as many things regarding preparation as I can before the school year begins so that I only have to worry about creation then.

Website Creation

Today I also set up my website for my process journal - I spent quite a while sorting through layouts and things, but I finally decided on one and spent over an hour getting my bearings and trying to fit my information into the website in an aesthetically pleasing yet efficient manner. I am using Wix, which is a surprisingly easy platform to use.

Costume Design

This evening I worked on making moodboards for Athena’s, Aphrodite’s, and Hera’s costumes. The video that I had seen from the Royal Opera House that talked about costume designs said to research your characters and get a sense for who they were before designing anything. Because I love Greek mythology I was already quite familiar with the personalities of Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, but I looked it up quickly anyway. I then went to images and looked took some images of the goddesses for inspiration. Once I had assembled those, I looked for recurring themes in color and style.

• Aphrodite: blue, pink gold, flowy fabric, slim-fit

• Athena: blue, silver, gold, armor, spear, headdress

• Hera: gold, golden crown/headdress

I don’t sew really or design clothes, so making a moldboard was a little difficult, just because I wan’t sure at first what I wanted the dress to look like at all. I didn’t want to have traditionally Greek costumes, but I didn’t want to set the time period forward in time, so I was a little confused. I looked up how other designers had done moldboards, and just started I suppose - I began with Aphrodite. I knew I wanted high fashion, so I looked for high-fashion-bordering-on-crazy-art clothes in the colors I had identified. After getting Aphrodite’s moldboard done, I had more of an idea of what to do - grab images that had a form I like, a color that was interesting, color palette that was right, a beautiful headdress, unique sleeves, basically grab things that sparked ideas. These moodboards are not concrete and may change due to any new information I may acquire - this served the purpose of jogging my memory as much as it served a purpose of being a moodboard. I didn't have any idea of how I wanted to stage my production and since I've read that costume and set design influence each other, I thought that getting some ideas for costume design (because I love fashion) would help me develop more of a vision for the whole production.

BELOW - Image #1: Aphrodite, Image #2: Athena, Image #3: Hera