Internship at the Estonian National Opera (Rahvusooper): Part One

In the end of October I started a new exciting phase in my life and Monday 20th was the first day of my on-the-job learning period at the Estonian National Opera. The following 9 weeks would include a lot of work, two premieres and some sightseeing in the city of Tallinn and living in Keila.

Most of the pictures are taken by me, otherwise the photos are credited in the captions.

Estonian Opera House (picture taken by Aleksi Joensuu)

My working counsellor, assistant counsellors and other co-workers showed me around the costume department and the building. For example there are a costume storage (you can rent costumes from there), shoemakers, jewellery makers and milliners, fabric dyeing department, shoemakers and of course the stages and halls and all the other departments.

As my first assingment I did money pockets, belts and a bow tie.

The example of the money pocket (in the middle), money pockets in progress (right-hand side) and a glimpse of white and black lace soon to be a belt (left).

A black bow tie and a belt (above) as an example for the products I was making (the silver below). Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture when they were ready.

A costume for The Sleeping Beauty -ballet. This ballet's costume desinger, british Peter Docherty arranged and pinned the ribbons in place. I attached them on the lycra suit with a sewing machine.

Same suit from behind.

This ribbon was challenging to handle, because it fell apart very easily as you can see from the picture.

I made a lot of lace cuffs and collars, which I enjoyed as the materials were nice and the results pretty.

One bigger work assingment was making parts of the costumes for the Evil Queen's minions for The Sleeping Beauty. Assistant counsellor cut the fabrics and gave me instuctions. Putting these together, covering some parts with fabric and sewing the edges with pieces of different materials took many working days. It was interesting because these costumes were very different than anything I had done before. I also sew some parts of the lycra suits (attached zippers etc) and it's a shame that I don't have photos of them, because the fabric's print was beautiful.

Work in progress.

Close-up.

These were worn on the hips. The other parts were on the shoulders.

And of course I sew some buttons and hooks, changed new zippers for jackets and repaired broken clothes and made them bigger or smaller when needed.

A dancer tried the vest on the stage, but the change in between the different costumes was so fast, that half of it's buttons needed to be snap fasteners.

Same thing happened with these blue jackets.

November 14th was the premiere day of Pjotr Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty (Uinuv kaunitar in estonian). You can read more about it here. That week before that was very busy for all of us and everyone worked hard to get everything ready in time. We got to see the main rehearsal of the ballet - in my opinion it was beautiful! The sets, the music and atmosphere, the skilled dancers - and I've always loved to see the costumes on stage and in use. In the end of the day we celebrated at the premiere party with the scenographers and set constructions workers etc!