Twelfth Night Head Gear
My newest costume piece for @KnavishHedgehog performing #TwelfthNight at #winnipegfringe pic.twitter.com/WB31L9hkFJ
— Colourful Threads (@ColourfulThread) July 9, 2015
My newest costume piece for @KnavishHedgehog performing #TwelfthNight at #winnipegfringe pic.twitter.com/WB31L9hkFJ
— Colourful Threads (@ColourfulThread) July 9, 2015
The Such Stuff Players will be performing Romeo and Juliet on April 14-16, 2015 and the costuming crew is in the final stretch.
We’re on a tight budget. For about $200 dollars we have to clothes 25 actors, some in multiple costumes. So we often reuse or rework items, and scrounge when necessary. But as our actors are growing all the time, we are often faced with the need to build from scratch. With such limited resources, however, when a mistake is made we need to do whatever we can to rescue the item. We don’t often have enough resources to allow for do-overs!.
So when I built this little vest with a small scrap of material from last year’s production I was feeling very proud. The young actor was excited to being wearing the same material that the young hero had worn last year.
And when we made the decision that not only this vest, but a second one were too short in the body and would need to be lengthened, I panicked. There was not enough fabric to recut either vest.
Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing performed by the Knavish Hedgehogs at the Winnipeg Fringe, 2014.
The sketches were all provided to me by the director, Mariam Bernstein. I worked hard to maintain the look of the sketches on a $250 budget.
The fabric I found at the second-hand store wasn’t enough for a complete long dress. I found some matching fabric and was able to custom build the dress for the actor.
This was my first show where I did not work with a team. One of the actors, the talented Hannah Beynon, worked on a couple of costumes, but the bulk of the costuming, and all the props and sets fell to myself and my Propman, Kirby Gehman.
Mariam Berstein, the troupe’s amazing director, had a very strong vision for this play and provided drawing for each of the costumes and strong ideas for colour and look. It was a pleasure to work with her and on a very limited budget ($250) help bring her vision to life.
In the end, I built and assembled 24 costumes for 10 actors in under six weeks, mostly on my own!
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline by Such Stuff Player, April 2014
This was my second show with Such Stuff Players and it was a pleasure to work with the costume design team. there was a lot of freedom in the creation of the costumes for Cymbeline, as it wasn’t placed in a historical era, and the director wanted it to have the feel of a Grimm’s fairytale.
The costume team works together to set the final vision and uses a communal approach to plan and make final decisions. In addition, any of the young actors who wish to participate in the process are encouraged to do so at whatever level they desire. Those of us with more experience mentor those with less and the result is truly an amazing team effort.
Here’s just a few of the costumes I made or helped mentored.