“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.”
– Walt Disney
About
Talia Sanz is a Scenographer – Architect – Set Designer & Decorator based in London. Her work crosses the genres: opera, theatre, immersive and devise theatre, installation and film. An avid creative designer, Talia immerses in the collaboration to create sets focused on developing visual solutions to connect the potential of space, body, form, texture, colour, sound and light through live performance and film mediums.
As an active and experienced associate designer Talia is a very capable model maker and draughtswoman, ensuring a paritive vision between all disciplines involved in the delivery of the live performance while looking after the aesthetic quality of the production from an early stage in the development of the piece.
Talia has a MFA degree in Scenography at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and has a Set Decorating for Film certificate from Creative Media Skills in Pinewood Studios; and a Specialization in Scenic Design certificate from Centro Cultural Britanico in Peru. She also has an extensive grounding BA degree in Architecture at the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC).
Member of Society of British Theatre Designers (SBTD).
Click on a skill to view selected work
Visiting
2017
Art & Prop Department
Director: Charlotte Regan
Short film directed and written by Charlotte Regan. Art and Prop department team with Alice Eadson and Erin Guann, the main responsibilities included set and prop design/dressing for a prison’s visiting room.
Pickled Eggs
2017
Production Designer
Director: Justine Priestley
Short film from Really Bright Media and directed by Justine Priestley. Production design team with Chiara Fugazza and Ellawyn Cruz, the main responsibilities included the creation of a bar logo, set and prop design/construction; for a Pub Quiz Event in a crapy bar and a living room.
Also worked in collaboration with the costume department and DoP.
Mr. Baggage
2017
Production Designer
Director: Justine Priestley
Short film from Really Bright Media and directed by Justine Priestley. Production design team with Chiara Fugazza and Ellawyn Cruz, the main responsibilities included the creation of a color palette -based on the bowl of mints-, logo design, set and prop design/construction; for a vintage office of lost baggage that included the reception and staff room.
Also worked in collaboration with the costume department and DoP.
Fight Like A Girl
2019
Designer
Director: Nick Stimson
BYMT summer season- music by James Atherton. Words, lyrics and direction by Nick Stimson at the Mountview Theatre, London.
Talia’s set and costume design focuses in the fusion of a large-scale musical theatre with the dynamic physicality of boxing; and the timeline that narrates the story between past and present.
Production photos: Leanne Dixon
“The sombre note dominated here also in Talia Sanz’s simple, spare and deeply gloomy design (curiously apt in this new building, the entrance atrium of which really does resemble the interior of a prison cell block…”
– Julian Eaves, British Theatre
The Actor’s Nightmare
2019
Assistant Designer
Director: Lydia Parker
Designer: Anna Driftmeier
Park Theatre, London.
Responsibilities included set construction, prop-making and costume sourcing.
Production photos: Ali Wright
A Fantastic Bohemian
2018
Scenographer, Set Designer & Prop-maker
Director: María Inés Olmedo
‘The Tales of Hoffmann Revisited’. Grimeborn Festival- music by Jacques Offenbach with new orchestrations by James Garner, with English translation by Jeff Clarke. Words and direction by María Inés Olmedo at the Arcola Theatre, London.
An immersive experience, performed across three spaces through Arcola’s building, which takes place during the artistic and cinematic Golden Age of Mexico (1930’s-1950’s).
By relocating this opera from a Tavern in Nuremberg in the late 1880’s to a Dance Hall in the 1940’s, Talia recreated this artistic atmosphere where audiences were invited to step into a fantastic bohemian universe, meeting these historical characters and encounter vice, love, passion, treachery and all timeless signs of human condition and operatic poetic in one night.
Production photos: Patrick Baldwin
Parallel Voices
2017
Scenographer & Curating team
Performer: Cynthia Callejas
Designed and conceived by Talia as part of CRUSH showcase at Hackney Showroom in London.
Talia is presenting her visions in scenography and set design through the ground-breaking opera ‘La Voix Humaine’, written by Jean Cocteau and composed by Francis Poulenc. In a world of highly interconnected society, she explores isolation and self expression materialising a physical 3d model in such a way that the different fragments of Elle’s dialogue were spatially shaped. Recreating a replica of Studio 1 in Arcola theatre, the miniature version was divided into 9 sections supported by red cords. These cords were the object that maintained the tension between the body and the piece of fragment in which the body was located.
See the exhibition brochure PDF and CRUSH webpage.
Model-box photos: Jemima Yong
The Vanishing Bridegroom
2017
Assistant Designer
Director: Stuart Baker
Designer: Andrew Riley
BYO summer season- by Judith Weir. Directed by Stuart Barker, designer Andrew Riley at the Peacock Theatre, London.
Assistant designer team with Kirsty Currie and Isabel Walters. Responsibilities included the making of props, puppets and set supervision.
Production photos: Robert Workman
Don Giovanni
2017
Assistant Designer
Director: James Hurley
Designer: Rachel Szmukler
BYO summer season- music by W. A. Mozart, Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, with English translation by Amanda Holden. Directed by James Hurley, designer Rachel Szmukler at the Peacock Theatre, London.
Assistant designer team with Lily O’hara and Meghan Grieve. Responsibilities included the making of scale model, props, masks and set supervision.
Production photos: Robert Workman
A Landslide Story
2017
Scenographer
Performer: Chusi Amorós
Created and conceived by Talia as part of the Scenography Open Studio exhibition at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
The concept is based in experimenting a relation with adobes – hand made bricks – and their resistance; the instability of an unpredicted collapse and the body in order to express a dramaturgy of Peru’s landslide disaster. Grounded in the live intersection of body, space, materials and dramaturgy, the interaction between the body in the space created by this bricks is one of the premises of this work.
See the exhibition brochure PDF.
Oedipus Rex
2017
Speculative Design:
Set, light and costume
Academic project for MFA Scenography programme in RCSSD.
Design and conceptualisation based on “Oedipus Rex” (1927) opera composed by Igor Stravinsky and libretto by Jean Cocteau. The development of the speculative project had to be negotiated in relation to an actual space: The Hackney Empire, London.
The Costume as Carnal light
2017
Performing research
Illustration: Chiara La Ferlita
This research explores practical intersections of costume and lighting to test out the potential variability of physical experiences implied under “carnal light” (Vasseleu), or what Mzerleau-Ponty called “phenomenal light”. By considering light as a skin – one that envelopes the body mediating the interaction between its interior and exterior – this project seeks to understand how the resulting change in the perception of space and of the body can be central to the process of costume design.
La Traviata
2015
Speculative Design:
Set, light and costume
Academic project for the Specialization in Scenic Design course at Centro Cultural Britanico (Lima, Peru). Design and conceptualisation based on Giuseppe Verdi set to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave.
Style: Steampunk Time: Timeless space
Távara & Sanz Arquitectos (TySarq)
2013-2016
Partner and Project Director
Architect
Independent architecture studio, created in alliance with fellow colleague.
Design development and drafting, architectural construction details and monitoring construction suppliers at residential projects.
Renders: Talia Sanz Photos: Maria Eugenia Trujillo
Clinic and Professional Specialization Center in Equestrian Veterinary
2013-2015
Thesis Project
The thesis project consists in a Veterinary Clinic with a Center of Equestrian Rehab attached to a school that provides professional education in a specialization of equestrian veterinary. It provides specialized facilities for animal welfare, medical veterinary, students practice and recreational opportunities for any visitor.
