Sleeping Beauty pocketbooks – Fairy

Product description

Our story is pure and simple. When seamstresses at the National Theatre Studios and Workshops were sewing costumes for the ballet The Sleeping Beauty, we gathered up the cuttings of fabric and assorted them according to the respective roles and colours. Subsequently, we brought them to Lemniskata, a sheltered workshop, whose employees cut them into tiny pieces. Then we took the pieces of fabric to Papirea, a small factory in the Jizera Mountains, whose workers made paper of them. Every hue of the hand-made paper thus bears a message of a ballet character, reflecting his/her nature. We brought the sheets of paper back to the sheltered workshop, where they created from them pocketbooks – for your notes, records of experiences, plans, wishes … for further invention, as the blank pages undoubtedly crave your ideas. They are harbingers of new messages. 

Each pocketbook has inside a drawing of a costume designed by Pablo Núñez. The pink paper dreams like Aurora after being kissed, the green carries the fairies’ hopes, the blue plumps its feathers …  

Giving a second life to things – that is what the National Theatre strives to do. Products have been upcycled under the National Theatre logo ... In relation to The Sleeping Beauty, we have creatively reused waste, transforming the redundant materials into new, useful products. 

What is more, the Czech National Ballet members joined forces with the employees of the sheltered workshop and the paper-maker, and in the spring planted 28 fruit trees in the village of Zdislava in the Jizera Mountains. We returned to nature that which we had taken. Everything is connected and the story’s circle has closed.