Dressing the “Vixen”: Meet the College of Music costume shop!

As Ann Piano walks me around the Imig Music Building, she opens doors into rooms I’ve never seen. Inside, racks of colorful fabric, shelves upon shelves of shoes, bins of belts and the ghosts of characters who had come before. 

Piano, the college’s costume coordinator/designer + shop manager, joined the College of Music full-time in 2021. She and her team help advise the selection of opera and musical productions; then the creative work begins.

“Once the shows have been selected, I read them,” Piano says. “I research past productions. I look to see if it’s a show we should be trying to put into our stock—like, are those costume pieces useful? Can I reuse these things many times over the years?”

This spring, the costume team is creating ensembles for “The Cunning Little Vixen,” a 20th-century opera by Leoš Janáček presented by our Eklund Opera Program, April 16-19. The three-act opera explores the cycle of life through the fairy tale setting of a forest and the turning of its seasons.

The show features two “worlds” in its cast of characters—the human world consisting of roles like the Forester, the Innkeeper and the Parson; and the animal world including the Fox, the Dog and the titular Vixen. In Piano’s mind, the humans are inspired by traditional Bavarian fashion but with a colorful, patterned twist not usually seen in this show.

“A lot of times they make the humans sort of dark, gray and drab and that’s not my speed,” she says. “This is a life-affirming story, right? Let’s let the humans be colorful and bright. The stories are fairy tales and they are from that world—I thought we should be representing that.”

For the animals, the team is using earthy tones—browns, greens and rusts. To disguise the human actor underneath, Piano plans to use an abundance of textures and ruffles.

Read the full story on the CU Boulder College of Music website.

Due to significant campus activity and noise impacts on April 17 and 18 from a large university‑hosted event, several performances of “The Cunning Little Vixen” have changed. The dates and times currently listed on cupresents.org reflect the updated schedule.