In yesterday’s post we looked at the power of fashion and ballet, let’s continue the thread today with a post that looks at costumes, but that also honours Sylvano Bussotti, the Italian composer and costume designer who died yesterday in Milan at 89.
Bussotti was a unique figure, an eclectic artist who alternated in his life his work as a composer with stints as a costume and set designer for the ballet, theatre and opera. He would reunite his productions under an ironic umbrella name – Bussotti Opera Ballet – in short BOB.
Born in 1931 in Florence, Bussotti was introduced to fine arts by his brother and uncle who were painters. As his father worked as a doorman at the Uffizi, the young Bussotti often visited the gallery, even though when it came the time to choose his path, he opted for music, rather than painting and enrolled in the music school in Florence to study violin. His studies were interrupted when the Second World War broke out.
In the mid-to-late '50s Bussotti moved to Paris where he studied music with Max Deutsch. In Paris he also met Pierre Boulez and Heinz-Klaus Metzger who invited him to follow summer music courses in Darmstadt, Germany, and introduced him to John Cage. American pianist David Tudor first played Bussotti's compositions in public in 1958 in Germany.
The recipient of many awards, Bussotti was known for his compositions that left enough space to the performers to improvise, an aspect that many musicians loved about his music.
Bussotti directed different theatres and events including the Fenice Theatre and Music Biennale (from 1987 to 1991) in Venice, while often creating sets and costumes for ballets, in particular for those performed by his partner, the dancer Rocco Quaglia.
As seen in previous posts, Bussotti could be described as Dionysian in his costumes: he had a passion for decorative elements, embellishments and embroideries and also loved experimenting with new materials such as plastics that helped him creating translucent effects on stage.
Bussotti was fascinated by the human body, admired Nijinsky and the overdecorated costumes of the Ballets Russes. Moving from the photograph of Nijinsky in a bodysuit in "L'Après-midi d'un faune", Bussotti created a series of unique body pieces and bodysuits for dancers.
For Heliogabalus in a 1981 staging of the ballet "Phaidra-Heliogabalus" in Turin, he made for example a nude bodysuit on which he applied three different sections, a bejeweled sleeve, a shell-shaped codpiece covered in spikes and a thigh piece decorated with beads and sequins.
Quite often Bussotti used sections of costumes, bondage straps in leather or velvet crisscrossed on the body and collars attached to just one sleeve to highlight the body in outrageous ways or to deconstruct it, symbolically dismembering it.
The overembellished single sleeve was also one of his signature designs: this concept was inspired to him by mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian who showed Bussotti a sleeve created by an artisan for her. Bussotti went on to create overembellished one-sleeve attachments or costumes, usually covered in pearls, golden flowers, leaves and crystals.
The composer would also add extremely detailed descriptions of these pieces on his musical partitions, proving that music inspired costumes and viceversa.
Bussotti was rediscovered last year at the Quadriennale exhibition "Fuori" at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome and he will be homaged in Florence from today till 25th September with a series of events (entitled "90 Bussotti") that were originally organised to celebrate his 90th birthday on 1st October. Yet it would be intriguing to organise a proper exhibition of his costumes (that were usually made by the Annamode tailoring house in Rome) and study them again also from a queer point of view, something that has rarely been done so far.
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