If you are interested in studying Design and Production at the collegiate level...this blog post is for you! We had the opportunity to chat with Becky Bodurtha who is a Costume Designer and a Visiting Assistant Professor/Head of Design at Fordham University about what it takes to be successful when designing a show. Read on to learn some invaluable tips to tackle your next production!
Let's talk about assembling a design team.
The design team is chosen by the director. He or she will find the set designer, costume designer, lighting designer and sound designer that they want to work with for a particular project. Once I have the script of a play I can look at what the needs are for the production. Do I need a wig person? Do I need a crafts person? Do I need a stitcher? Each show is incredibly different. Some productions are very heavily shopped. On that type of show I will generally hire a shopper to run errands and do returns. Agamemnon was mostly built. For that production I had a team of stitchers and crafts people. I also found some people who were interested in makeup to help produce the makeup design.
Once the play is chosen, there are a few things you should do first.
Once I have been hired on a project, the first step is reading the play. I will read the play before I even speak to the director. This is useful so we can have a discussion with our different point of views of the text. The next step is meeting with the director. We will often talk about the themes of the play, the characters and how we think the world of the play should look. We will also talk about the conventions of the play.
For Agamemnon we discussed the inherent religious nature of the Greek culture. We wandered through contemporary places in the world that still possess a religious sensibility in daily life. We talked about Bali, 
India and the Middle East. We eventually wandered back around to Ancient Greece, but chose to merge it with contemporary fashion in order to give it more severity and to create distinction of character. Then we look at visual research; images that reflect our ideas of the world of the play. These images are shared with the whole team of designers so we can talk about where our ideas connect and are disparate. Image research is the way that we communicate our ideas in order to arrive at a cohesive design.
There is a process to analyzing characters and creating the perfect match costume wise.
Analysis of character begins in the text. Finding clues into their personal history, their family history, where they live, who they have relationships with are all useful to discovering the character. I have a very long list of questions I ask; age, socio-economic status, time period, geographical location, housing, etc. Thats always a great place to start, but also pretty immediately I move into image research.
In Agamemnon, Kassandra was one of the most interesting characters to work with. I began with clues from the text that described her in bird metaphors. I also looked at her practical circumstances. She is from Troy. She is an other. She is a prophetess who has been taken from her home to be the mistress of Agamemnon. These things all informed the choices for her costume.
Her dress was a combination of many colors and patterns to distinguish it from the other single colored costumes on stage. Her headdress was made of feathers...600 feathers, to harken back to the bird metaphor, but also to further push her into a look that made her distinct. We also painted her body with a Greek style of hieroglyphics. With these choices I was also able to work with the actor to imbibe the garments with things she was working on with her character. She felt that each fabric in her dress would have been chosen by the women in her priesthood, that each piece of her body painting had meaning for her character.
Even though there is often extensive work on character, there is also a larger picture that you have to address with costume. How does it look with the set? Is the story made clearer with the clothes that you put on stage? Do the clothes help you know where to look on the stage? The job of creating a world and helping tell the story of the play is collaborative. Everyone on the team has something to contribute to the production as a whole. When you get the privilege of working with a team that is excited about conversation, about working together to make each element cohesive, then you truly will have an amazing process of creating theatre.
Interested in adding Fordham to your college list? Check them out on Acceptd here.
