"Cosi Fan Tutte"
This play was a paper project assigned in a scene design course. Mozart's opera, "Cosi Fan Tutte," was composed in 1790. As reviews frequently mention, the plot is often viewed as utterly inferior to the sumptuous music. In this opera, two men, Ferrando and Guglielmo, enter a bet as to whether their fiancees, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, will remain faithful in their absence. In Mozart's original story, Ferrando and Guglielmo pretend to go to war but come back and disguise as "strangers" to seduce the women. Dorabella and Fiordiligi fall into faithlessness, leading to the sarcastic title, which translates "All Women Are Like That."
However, I think "Cosi Fan Tutte" is not just an innocent and simple-hearted eighteen-century's love story. It could be seen as a modern event about how penetration occurs in our everyday life. To infiltrate, we do not have to be a detective, journalist, or spy. In our daily life, activities such as firsthand gossip, interviewing, reading, or viewing "inside story," and peeping, all involve a degree of infiltration. By virtue of such a penetration, we collect information that we should have not received in and through other's lives, organizations or groups. Our everyday practice of penetration occurs frequently in intimate relationship, too. We engage in various forms of penetration, such as peeping other's diary, e-mail, or monitoring our romantic partner's telephone conversations. We do this not just out of curiosity. Rather, by various techniques of penetration, we want to attest certain beliefs of our beloved ones, most importantly, their fidelity and loyalty.
In this opera, Ferrando and Guglielmo contrived Dorabella and Fiordiligi. They penetrate their lives by setting up a different situational context that places Dorabella and Fiordiligi to be subject to secret monitoring. In doing so, the men become tricksters to test the women's fidelity. However, to acquire this sort of information might be an incidental gain or cost of an intimate relationship. When Ferrando and Guglielmo find that Dorabella and Fiordiligi are seduced by their disguised identities. As tricksters, Ferrando and Guglielmo are also entrapped by the unwanted information that they shouldn't have acquired. So how do "tricksters" deal with the information acquired by engaging in indirect act of cheating and infiltrating? How do they validate their discovery of secret information? How do they reveal themselves, as the voice of justice, or as bad guys?
Thus, "Cosi Fan Tutte" poses some very interesting questions for me. Penetration can lead to entrapment in which infiltrator or trickster actually can "set up" a game, or a test, but can do nothing about the results. The penetrators are thus vulnerable to the consequences of their penetration and expose the vulnerability an intimate relationship. Since such a situation can occur in our everyday life, I modernize this opera as an event surrounded by modern world element. Figure 8 is a ?" scale model of the final proposal of the scene design. It is the scene for Act I in which two young officers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, boast about the beauty and virtue of their sweethearts. Don Alfonso, an older man and a friend of the two officers, insists that a woman's constancy is like the Arabian phoenix - everyone says it exists but no one has ever seen it. Figure 9 is also the scene of Act 1 in which the sisters Dorabella and Fiordiligi gaze blissfully at their miniature portraits of Guglielmo and Ferrando and imagine happily that they will soon be married. Figure 10 is created for the scene of Act II in with the double-wedding scene will take place.