Sonya Berlovitz designs costumes for theater productions in Minnesota. Through bold use of color, fabric and design, she brings a contemporary aesthetic to the stage. Check out our Q&A with Sonya.

Sonya will be in residency for six weeks in March and April 2010 at Fairfield University in Conneticut. She will be designing costumes for a production of Romeo and Juliet as well as conducting workshops in collaboration with her sister and Theatre de la Jeune Lune founding member Barbra Berlovitz. For more information visit Fairfield University's website here, and check out a brochure on the Romeo and Juliet Project here.

Image courtesy Fairfield University.

The lights in the theater were off save the lonely ghost light on stage, a faded glimmer of withered hope. I ushered myself, in the dark, to one of the worn red chairs that were forever going to be replaced, sat down and stared ahead. I was all at once completely calm for the first time in several months. Time stops sitting in a darkened theater, a place where I have spent a considerable portion of my adult life. I waited.

Ten weeks earlier Dan, Julia and I stood together, heads bowed, in shocked silence as Dan, Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s technical director, who rarely spoke unless spoken to, confided that the theater was closing. Although the three of us almost never convened, no words seemed appropriate to the moment.

For two years I heard suggestions that the theater was on the brink of closure. Warned often that we couldn’t know if we would still be open in three weeks, I remained in a semi-chosen state of disbelief. I comforted myself with the notion that theatre life is always on the edge, he next big upswing surely just around the corner. It was a hopeful thought contradicted only by the ever-increasing hunch to my shoulders.

Sitting in the still theatre I breathed slowly and deliberately, trying to fully absorb the profundity of the moment. Amidst the quiet I could hear barely audible murmurs of excitement. The buzz of anticipation swirling up and over every seat coming at me from several directions to which I could find no response and, at the point of no return, I carefully made my way in the dark down the stairs, out of the theater and back into the daylight of the lobby.

I just checked my email messages for the ninth time in an hour. I’m desperately seeking something to hold onto. Something like a proverbial life raft that will save me from drowning in a sea of inexhaustible memories. I, with resigned helplessness, realize a loss, is a loss. The only thing I can do right now is exist in the void I find myself in until I can reemerge, soul intact. There is nothing to hold onto. I’m reminded of the apt phrase written on the “Tony wall” at the closing night party “well, that happened”.

I am trying to whittle thirty years down to the five or six costumes Kelly, the building administrator, told me we could put into the University of Minnesota’s archive. It’s a seemingly impossible task. For three months, two or three times a week, I have scavenged through the theater’s cavernous costume storage. Armed with one lowly trouble light I’ve painstakingly searched through many cubicles filled with thousands of costumes, each piece a representation of some part of Jeune Lune’s illustrious history, now lifeless testimonials to years of more successes than failures.

The sharp pain on the left side of my neck is a nagging reminder of the weight I am bearing. I am filled with constant anxiety that sometimes makes it hard to stay asleep in the morning. I’m worried about the most relevant costumes in Jeune Lune’s history disappearing before they reach the archives. Even though I rationally know only a few trustworthy souls have keys to costume storage, costumes have disappeared before. Evidence of their existence remaining solely on the shelf of archival photographs. I needlessly chide myself for my inattention to documenting my work over the years.

I never leave my apartment, the theater, or my car without transporting large volumes of costumes, bags of stuff, furniture, dress forms, notebooks or anything else that needs to be assigned a final resting place. I’m a refugee in hasty exile to the solitude of my apartment where I quietly try to make sense of it all. My living space, which acts as a funnel for the theater’s retired articles, some days, feels like a brief rest stop on the highway to insanity.

Once the closure was announced the theatre began to physically dwindle. The computers were removed; cords left dangling, like remnants from a hurried surgical procedure. The machine started winding down towards its last gasp. Miscellany started to pile up in corners of the office. Desks were emptied one by one. Boxes of what at one time seemed crucial were left standing, strewn carelessly open on tabletops. Photographs taken at various stages seemed to be scattered everywhere; tiny emotional mines that could propel me in any direction. On my bad days I walked through the office with eyes fixed straight ahead.

I went to the closing ceremony because I wanted to “officially” end my sojourn at Jeune Lune; to say good-bye to the building and all of the people who made it possible. It was a mature ideal that found little salvation in reality.
For the party, the theatre was emptied; red chairs stacked high in one corner. Around the periphery were piled a few, oversized props, for silent auction. Since most of the lighting equipment had been sold, there was no ambiance. The theater never looked sadder. Easily one hundred people were milling about but there was no longer any life there.

Tense and unsure of what to say or how to react, many people said the wrong thing. For most of the evening I self medicated with a conversation in my head. The numb, confused state it left me in was temporarily intoxicating. I eventually came down and sadly realized there’s just no getting around a loss. You have to move through it.

Stuffy the clown, the theater’s gigantic unofficial mascot, was thrown off the roof just before 11 p.m. in a macabre last ritual that perfectly and flatly punctuated the senselessness of the last few years’ chain of events. The thud as he hit the sidewalk in front of the theater was a communal sound that could have been any one of us.

At precisely eleven o’clock Kelly Schaub, the building administrator, made a toast in the lobby. As she raised her glass I reluctantly scanned the emotional landscape before me. Montages of the peaks and valleys, and of course the tourists. I started to retreat into myself again until my brother gently touched my arm.
“I’m done”, I said.

Then with the only bit of inertia I could muster I walked, looking straight ahead, through the lobby, out the door and into the blurred, frigid air.

I had known from the beginning that I would eventually be moving out of the spacious, western style hotel that I had been staying in for my first three months in Tokyo complements of Yohji Yamamoto Inc,. Yokoyama-san from Human Resources, a young woman who could be very accommodating yet was coolly business like in her demeanor explained in her heavily accented English that she would take me wherever I wanted to look for an apartment. The hotel had been a great comfort so I was more than a little nervous about the change, but excited to finally be given a chance to decide my own fate. Up to that point I had politely accepted, as is prescribed by Japanese culture, all arrangements made for me.

I started combing the English speaking paper for rental advertisements. In the meantime I was asked to look at an apartment in a building owned by Yohji Yamamoto’s mother, Fumi Sensei. One Sunday (the company’s day off) Yokoyama-san accompanied me to Eifukucho, a suburb of Tokyo. As we were boarding our train at the station nearest work, she spoke excitedly about the apartment and emphasized that it was really close. For me the trains ride along the Inokashira line heading northwest of Tokyo seemed endless. The eight stations seemed to be a considerable distance apart, each station seeming further away than the last. After three months of walking just fifteen minutes to work, I had little patience for what now by comparison seemed like an interminable ride.

When we finally arrived at our destination the surroundings looked different, definitely suburban. The low-lying residential buildings were more spread out and there were no office buildings in site. The residential streets with no sidewalks and very tiny, manicured lawns seemed spotless compared to Tokyo. I felt out of place and far away from that to which I had become accustomed over the past three months.

Fumi Sensei’s building, which was four blocks from the train stop, was close to being finished but still under construction. The magnitude of the project was impressive. There were, I quickly estimated, about fifty apartments total, which helped confirm that Fumi Sensei was indeed a wealthy, powerful woman. I knew that her glass office door bore a label saying Chairperson, but up to that point I had assumed it was only a superficial title politely bestowed upon her for being the mother of the company’s president. Now, standing there on a pile of sand looking up at the five-story building soon to be filled with renters, I realized the fallacy in that judgment.

Since it was Sunday, and most likely a day off for the nowhere to be seen construction crew, we were unable to access any of the apartments. The deserted feel of the scene did not enhance my quickly dimming view. Yokoyama-san suggested I look inside the window at an apartment on the first floor since it would be identical to my own, and she left to look for a building manager. Peering through the dusty ground floor window I could barely make out a long, narrow room, approximately 15 feet long and seven feet wide. I forced a deep breath and looked again to verify that I had indeed seen the whole room. I felt a wave of panicked claustrophia. When Yokoyama-san returned alone, I said nothing, and hoped the “no way” over my head was not visible, as that would be considered very impolite. As we rode the eight stations back to Shibuya, which seemed even longer on the return, I barely spoke, grateful that silence between people in Japan is a social norm. Yokohama-san only once broke the silence once to mutter that she shouldn’t have shown me the apartment on a Sunday.

The next weekend, my initiative stoked by my wariness of the apartment at Eifukucho, I started looking elsewhere, by myself. Through the English speaking newspaper I quickly found and ad for an apartment that sounded promising and was just two train stops from work. The area around the station in Minato-ku was lush and filled with greenery, which except for the Municipal parks isn’t a common occurrence in Tokyo. It was early evening and someone had strung some Christmas lights on bushes in the area leading up to the apartment. There were wind chimes gently clanging and a sweet smell in the air. It gave the neighborhood a magical aura. I floated on delightful anticipation over to the apartment that in and of itself was not remarkable. It was a one story concrete building, very contemporary, very rectangular. I was not discouraged. From a discreet distance I managed to peer through a sliver of a window in the front door that had been covered by some sort of paper. I caught a glimpse of a moped and convinced myself that some hip, young urbanite lived there. To further augment the scenario I was creating, I scanned the neighborhood and noticed a tiny outdoor Laundromat with one empty chair. I pictured myself sitting there on Sundays reading the paper, drinking coffee, waiting for the wash to dry and occasionally chatting with a friendly and most fascinating neighbor. My brother Ralph in a phone call later that day pointed out with much sarcasm that I was single at 34 because those were the kinds of things I romanticized about. I was amused, but not deterred. I had found the Tokyo version of my dream home.

I charged into work on Monday and gleefully told Yokoyama-san that I had finally found the place I wanted to live – just two train stops away from Y’s and pretty economic. I really thought she was going to congratulate me. She didn’t. By the not so subtle expression of disapproval written on her face I could tell that something was very wrong. I turned and, with a deep sense of foreboding, walked away and up the stairs to the fourth floor, sat down at my desk, and tried to preoccupy myself with work.

Approximately an hour later I was called down to Fumi Sensei’s office. When I got there, her face, which was normally pink and cheery in my presence, looked very pale and distorted. She angrily through clenched teeth choked out “I will never touch you again”. I guessed that in her language that meant I was dead to her. I, all at once, was cut off from my surrogate Japanese mother who for three months had doted on me by providing reassuring words, weekend outings, elaborate homemade dinners and occasional culture defying hugs. My mind was frantically racing. “How could I make this better”? I cringed as I thought back to Monsieur Umetada’s warning given at my first orientation interview, “the most important thing at Y’s is to get along with Fumi Sensei”!

Within no time it seemed that everyone at Y’s knew about my predicament. I got pitied or disappointed looks from various co-workers who probably understood better than I did the implications of my actions. Normally polite, smiling peers wouldn’t acknowledge my presence. My partner, Kubo-san, just looked worried. He himself had said many times that it was “berry” important to get along with Fumi Sensei. I too late realized, unwittingly, in my clumsy, individualistic American way, had crossed an enormous social line and was now hanging by a thin silk thread.

Over the next few days spent in emotional isolation I vacillated between anxiety and anger. There was a litany of unanswered questions streaming through my brain. Hadn’t I been told that I could look for an apartment on my own? Was I actually being emotionally blackmailed into moving into Fumi Sensei’s apartment? Did I really have a choice if I wanted a future at Y’s? Comfort in my surroundings was my uppermost concern in any city, but especially Tokyo, concrete urbia, where life could be brutal and I knew no one besides the people at work. Full of self-recrimination at my own lack of conviction, disappointed to discover that my comfort in Tokyo was never mine to decide, and uncertain of my future at Y’s, I relented. My head fought my heart and won, though I didn’t feel any sense of victory.

The next day I walked into Yohji’s office and told him I would move into the apartment his mother had chosen for me.

I have 36 pairs of shoes in my closet, most of which I never reveal to the world. Most remain as reflections of a storied life, soled symbols of special occasions, high and low incomes, regretful loves, adventures with grave disappointments, and overseeing it all an ever-present love of design. There are a multitude of options, heels, flats, pointy toed, even pointier toed, vintage, modern, rubber, leather, cloth, and several pairs of Mary Janes, each of them playing at one time or another the leading role in this play called my life. Perpetually on a quest for that shoe that will even better define me, the other pairs are left hopelessly waiting for their next stint in the outer world withering because they can no longer speak to who I am.
I’m on an educational excursion to the Nieman Marcus shoe department with my mom to observe one of the players missing from my repertoire, Manolo Blahnik’s, by many considered the Cadillacs of the shoe world. I browsed around the department, empty except for three stiff salespeople and one exceptionally manicured woman, and found my pair of Manolos. They were black, slip on satin pumps with a low heel and a gracefully sculpted, pointed toe with just a hint of roundness at the end of which sat a small crystal embellishment to punctuate its elegance. Images of 1920's flappers danced across my brain and I lusted after them. With a quick look at the bottom of the shoe the spell was broken. Get real! At $695 they weren’t attainable. Going down the escalator

I sarcastically remarked to my mom “did you notice how no one asked to help us with anything?”

She semi-teasingly replied back “look at how we’re dressed, are you surprised?”

The bubble over my head was filled with resentment and I thought but didn’t say “I guess we weren’t manicured enough.”

As we descended, I shifted and sifted through the items in my 3 x 5 department on another excursion through the ebb and flow that defines my life. There are the punk movement inspired Doc Martens I wore for four years straight years right after I came back to Minneapolis from Japan and was treated like an outsider in my own city. I proudly wore the Docs as my fuck you shoes. Then there are the shiny, black oxfords that I bought as a student in France for 400 Francs when I couldn’t even afford to buy bread, but they made me look so chic and I had desperately wanted to blend in to the stylish French culture I regarded with a nagging infatuation. At the opposite end of the spectrum were some sweet old lady 50's pumps I found at a garage sale somewhere . Poor things, they’re dilapidated, but I still cherish them for their uniqueness. With a nod to pragmatism, I’ve at times allowed the weather to factor in to my footwear decisions. On the rare occasion I do zip on my ten dollar Kenneth Cole boots I walk the streets of Minneapolis with the proud tenacity of a naval commander inspecting the thousands of costumes I’ve realized in my mind.

Last and definitely least, there’s the obligatory pair of tennis shoes that I don for my weekly walks around Lake of the Isles while reflecting with my friend Alison. Other than my bras, they’re the one concession I’ve made to pure functionality. Afterwards, in the uncomfortable confines of my car I hurriedly change into that sense of self that has yet another story to tell.