There are an unglaublich 85 costumes in the Schaubühne’s 2024 hit Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe – and scenes of magical transformation, where decades pass in montages signalled predominantly by stepping out of one set of clothes and into another. The woman behind this marvel of costuming, Vanessa Sampaio Borgmann, who will also be costuming Marco Layera’s Territorium in January at the Schaubühne, pulled back the curtain on her process.
How do you see the role of costuming in a production?
Well, it’s the first thing you see – its aesthetic impact on the show. And I think it’s exciting that, if you do psychological theatre, you don’t really recognise it as a costume. And that’s hard work getting there. It’s just as beautiful a costume as one that’s like a painting, really in your face, but it leads you into a whole different universe or aesthetic. I think this variety of what it can be and what it can bring to a show and to a performance is super exciting.
How did you go about designing the costumes for Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe?
In the beginning, it was a totally different sort of adventure, in a way, because there was no play. There was only a card game. The overall development time was more than a year, and [director Robert Lepage] started by improvising with the actors. Nobody really knew what kind of story it would be. A lot of the time was just being there with the actors, watching improvs and being very spontaneous, because I just pulled stuff from stock to have on the rehearsal stage.
And really, in essence, it was playing around. I didn’t really have a conversation with Robert like, “Okay, here are my designs, and this will happen.” It was more, “Today we’re going to rehearse Paris in the 60s.” And then I had seven actors standing saying, “Hey, what am I going to wear?” And out of that characters developed.
But you weren’t only working with Schaubühne’s preexisting stock – weren’t you also designing costumes?
Using the stock was a way of exploring what the show could look like and what those characters could look like. And then from that building what we needed, designing, making in the workshops. The great thing about Schaubühne, the really special thing, is that they still have their own workshops for stage building and for costuming. We wouldn’t have been able to do that amount of costumes and in that detail if we didn’t have the stock and the workshops.
And developing the costumes with the workshops was fantastic, because just the amount of money that would have been needed to buy everything that we needed would never have been possible any other way. By the time we had the second round of improvs, we knew basically the main characters, the main structure was there, and we had, after the summer break, three weeks of stage rehearsal time. So, by the time we started rehearsals, I knew we would have to have all the costumes and then a really intense time of pulling fabrics and doing the designs and then having fittings.
In Territorium, you’re working with a piece that is not psychological theatre. How do you approach this kind of costuming work?
It’s interesting because with Marco, what’s really clear is that he thinks very visually for the whole production and show. It’s a play whose major plot points deal with Brände, fires. “What is a burned body?” is an image that he brought very early on to the process. How do we translate that so that it is also abstract and still feels alive in touch, and right for the actors?
You’ve spoken a lot about the Schaubühne being one of the last of Berlin’s theatres with its own workshops. Do you see that threatened by the recent culture cuts?
We’re very worried about the very cynical way that Joe Chialo and Kai Wegner are thinking about theatre. The workshops are not directly in danger as a result of these cuts, but I’m really worried about how the work of all theatremakers is threatened by them.
Will that constrain the kind of costumes you can design and what audiences see on stage?
Of course, the nightmare vision is that we have costumes sponsored by Tesla.
What do you think the Tesla-sponsored costumes would look like?
Shit.
