Designing costumes for modern dance comes with a unique sense of challenges. There is no text, no list of characters, and the story unfolds throughout the rehearsal process and even when the choreography is finalized there still needs to be room for the imagination of the audience to fill in the details. The biggest challenge I faced when observing rehearsals at first was to keep my mind open; to observe and feel without thinking too much. Gaining information about the story and its characters worked in a reverse process to how I usually design costume for plays. Instead of starting out with a list of what was needed, I began to make a list of what was not needed. In “Find Me in Here,” the costumes do not need to show off a feminine shape, they do not need to alter their bodies at all, and they do not need to look the same. From then I could start making decisions based on what I was observing. I decided that the materials had to feel natural, that the movement of the material had to be more solid and less fluid, that they had to create dancers that existed outside a world where women are defined by their bodies, but that we still really needed to see arms and legs. The dancers are almost childlike in a their confusion and discoveries about identity, and I wanted the costumes to reflect that. The rehearsal costumes are simple tent dresses with one muslin side, one earth-y colored side, and a black neck band. The shape rids the dancers of body-consciousness and the colors and material underscore the organic nature of the movement. This piece is also about the process of creating a dance piece, so it was important to me to allow the process of the project be reflected in its final performance. The dancers are allowed to let whatever might happen to a costume during rehearsals, i.e. grass stains, spilt gatorade, and general wear and tear, to happen. The results of the process will then be reinterpreted and used as inspiration for creating the final costumes.
costume talk April 12, 2009
The previous post shows Emily’s thought process in sketches. Last week when I had the dancers rehearse in skirts, we all agreed they were a bad idea –but the problem was how they obscured the legs rather than their inherent skirt-ness. Emily probably never saw the girls in long dresses, I just asked them to wear whatever they had, but still it was good to confirm what would have been a poor direction to go.
Instead, Emily has clearly been working with the idea of tent (waistless) dresses for a while and this time suggested a design connected more directly to our focus on process. She’ll create basic muslin tent dresses for the girls to wear in rehearsal and at the parks when we perform this summer. These are meant to be subjected to normal wear and tear, the signs of which Emily will then use to inform her final designs that are unique for each dancer.
Practical considerations such as quick turn-around between final the park performance and the concert performance (aug 29-30) and the fact that dancers aren’t exactly a messy bunch, led to Emily creating some preliminary designs to work from in the end –which we’ll keep playing with for a while.
I love this design concept because it addresses the individuality of each dancer within a “uniform” or “group” style and, more importantly, because it relates directly to my creative methodology. Yay Emily!
costume sketches April 12, 2009
Emily joined us for some rehearsals and just shared these sketches with me:
