“Cultural foot”: Each new production in the opera means four sea containers with props

Sandis Voldiņš, member of the board of the Latvian National Opera and Ballet, reveals that three to four new productions are created every season. In turn, each new production with its necessary accessories, including costumes, “means three to four sea containers”. “That place is just running out,” says Voldiņš. “Storage conditions are extremely important. Proper accounting is important so that you generally know where you have what is and where it came from. These are things that we have been quite actively dealing with for the last three or four years,” says Voldiņš.

It is planned that LNOB will hold the first public auction this September. Sale. In it, Latvian theater collectives, or amateur collectives, will have the opportunity to purchase both decorations and historical costumes from performances. “It’s not so much a question of money, but more of a story about how you recycle things,” emphasizes a member of the opera’s board.

Līga Kapsņa, head of the costume department of the Latvian National Opera and Ballet, explains that the costumes and fabrics stored in the warehouse can only be reused if they are in perfect order. “There is a person in the warehouse who monitors and organizes it all. This allows us to reuse the same costumes for other productions over and over again, even three times,” said Kapsņa.

In her opinion, it is extremely profitable to invest in an employee who is only engaged in organizing and arranging the warehouse. For example, the opera has also created a digital costume bible. Each new production has a digital description with, including a compilation of images of what each soloist’s costume looks like. “This allows resources to be reused,” says Kapsnia.

In opera and ballet, fabrics and other materials are also dyed on site, as it is impossible to buy everything needed in one tone for the performance. Thus, representatives of a rare profession – textile dyers – are also attracted.

In other Latvian theaters as well, such as the Latvian Puppet Theater, a lot of thought is put into how to consume as little new resources as possible, but to use more of the already available ones. So, for example, the mustaches of the puppet show’s ashes are made from the blades of artificial grass found in the interior of the Puppet Theater – the blades are painted in black with a marker.

Latvian Puppet Theater workshop artist Inese Zelmane states that she was brought up in such a way as not to throw anything out as much as possible. “When we moved, our workshops have shrunk from a penthouse to a one-room apartment,” says Zelmane about life in the newly opened Puppet Theater. “I pack many things in boxes and take them to youth centers, to art schools, offer them to children in work training classes.”

As a good example of the application of non-residue technology in the Latvian Puppet Theater, she mentions the show “Knight whose teeth hurt”. The puppets of the show were made from various household items, giving them a “second life”.

The program “Kultūrpēda” is financially supported by the Latvian Environmental Protection Fund. “Red Dot Media” SIA is responsible for the content of the program.

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