Costumes tell what text cannot
Teal, pink and yellow dresses, some homemade and some from the Utah Shakespeare Festival, were stretched across tables and standing upright on mannequins while USU graduate and undergraduate students inspected each outfit’s separate pieces with needles in hand.
One student, Bethany Deal, working toward a master of fine arts degree, carried a pair of pinstriped, fall-front trousers, prepping them for USU’s upcoming production of “Pirates of Penzance,” while waiting for an appointment with an actor who needed a beard fitting.
“I just had a fitting with the guy who is playing Frederic — his name is Chris Carter,” said Deal, as she opened the top of the pants to see how they were put on.
With a few days to put finishing touches on the costumes before the first dress rehearsal, the Costume Shop on the east side of the Chase Fine Arts Center was full of practicum and work study students collaborating to make deadlines. “Pirates of Penzance” calls for 2-3 costumes per person with a cast of 30 players.
The final week before a show is called “tech week” in the Costume Shop, Deal said, or, in her terms, “hell week.” During this week, as many as 20 people are busy with projects at a time, and it’s easy to bump into those working nearby, she said.
“Skills are important at this point,” Deal said. “Those who are the weakest link slow down the process. If we had no one who knew how to pattern, we couldn’t get anything done.”
The Costume Shop has existed since the building was constructed in 1968, costume designer Nancy Hills said.
Now, award-winning costumes come out of the Costume Shop almost every year, Deal said.
Designing costumes is therapeutic, Hills said, the way some household chores can be therapeutic. But her love for costume design runs deeper, and the Costume Shop has facilitated a space for her to make hundreds of design sketches become real.
“Costumes are storytelling,” Hills said behind small stacks of her recent costume sketches. “When you look at the character you need to know about them. You know. Who? What? When? Where? You can help tell that story.”
Theatre arts department head, Kenneth Risch said costumes reveal truths about characters that cannot be found in the script.
“Just as the way a person dresses in real life, what a person wears in theater reveals a lot about who a character is — inside or outside,” Risch said.
Part of that storytelling requires detailing the costumes, whether that means fraying, tearing or rubbing shoe polish on the garment, Hills said. The Costume Shop is lined with organizing drawers and tubs full of supplies students may need to alter the original garments, which personalizes them to characters’ situations. Hills said to make new costumes look worn, she will rub shoe polish into the fabric or scrape the fabric with sandpaper.
“I have a passion for 18th-century anything. I’ve done a lot of research on the military … on Army and Navy uniforms,” Hills said. “I saw British redcoats in Europe … and then you have to think, ‘How could I make clothes look like this?’ Because (soldiers) were wearing them for months and months.”
In this shop, thousands of costumes have come to life in this way and hundreds hang in a room just downstairs from the work space. The storage room is brimming with garments, from flapper dresses to royal velvet robes to 19th-century Gibson Girl get-ups. The clothing racks tower over those who enter, and at the back of the room is a black freight elevator that safely transports costumes up to the Costume Shop’s workspace.
“Our stock is exploding; we need to purge,” Deal said as she walked through a narrow aisle lined with piles of costumes that resembled fabric walls.
Deal said there was an incident in which Hills had a rack of costumes fall on top of her. Though she screamed, no one could hear her since sound in the storage room hardly travels because of the thick costume barricades. She was later able to escape the heap of clothing that fell on top of her, Deal said.
Odds and ends, such as pantyhose, bras, shoulder pads and cummerbunds, are kept in the Costume Shop’s work space to use in fittings.
“Organization is key,” Deal said. “If we don’t label the costumes right we’ll ask ‘Who does this go to?’ At the same time, it needs to be an open, free and friendly space. If not, it will stifle creativity.”
Because the Costume Shop has a large collection of garments, Hills said she can pull costumes for an entire show without making anything new. Some local groups rely on USU’s Costume Shop to dress characters in their productions but for a price. The Old Lyric Repertory Company, the Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre, and Weber State University’s theater program are a few of the groups who pay rental fees to use USU’s original costumes.
Ultimately, the costumes are well crafted, Hills said, but the final pieces are not created without a learning curve.
“Sometimes it’s hard to make students understand the leap between making the piece and learning how they tell a story — learning how to put it into this scenic melting pot,” she said.
After students finish the costumes they have been working on, Hills said the pieces become priceless treasures to the department.
“The uniqueness here is the ability undergraduate students have — who are beginning their training — to work hand in hand with graduate students, faculty designs and MFA graduate designs,” Risch said.
– catherine.meidell@aggiemail.usu.edu