“Reading the Play” Project
Read the Outline Reading the Play: Questions Costumers Should Ask. Then read One of the following One Act Comedies:
and ask yourself the questions in the outline. Write answers to these questions and post them to the Class Message Board
Questions you should ask yourself after reading the play script:
What is this play about in literal terms?
What is this play about in general or metaphorical terms (see Dramatic Metaphor and Concept below)?
What is the style of the play?
Many costume students are drawn to the field by an enthusiasm for one or more historical periods of dress. This project allows you to research an era, or ideally a small easy to handle segment of it, such as an object like a codpiece or a flag fan, or a particular type of garment, and make a new web page devoted to it. To do this well, and legally, you will need to find visual representations of your era or object that are copyright expired, make ones you create yourself, or which date before the concept of copyright existed. Before uploading images please refer to Wikimedia Copyright Rules to determine what is OK to post.
You also will wish to research your topic two ways. You will wish to consult both secondary sources and primary sources. In the case of costume history, examples of a primary source would include:
Continue reading Costume Class Project: Primary and Secondary Research on an Historical Costume TopicCostume Class Project: Historical Research Project
Step 1: Read and review in your mind the characters and setting of one of the following plays: [Note: Your instructor may assign different plays}
Chekhov’s decidedly slapstick One Act ‘The Marriage Proposal’: (aka ‘The Proposal‘, or ‘A Proposal of Marriage’) which has a Mel Brooks/Three Stooges feel. This play may be written by one of the founders of serious modern drama, but this is no drama, it is more like a 1900 Russian Saturday Night Live skit without the intellectual content.
‘Patience’: Aristocratic ladies who were engaged to cavalry officers, now spurn their fiancées in order to follow a fashionable (Oscar Wilde-like) poet in a goofy cult-like ardor. The poet, meanwhile, has the hots for a low born milkmaid. The soldiers plot to get the girls back, another sexy poet arrives on the scene, and chaos ensues. An operetta set in the Aesthetic movement in England of the 1880’s.
‘The Contrast‘: a 1787 American play that combines comedy and patriotic sentiments. Filled with characters that in transmuted form are still with us. The gossipy ingénues talk like 18th Century Valley Girls.
Continue reading Costume Class Project: Visual Historical Research for a PlaySo, I was kind of impressed with the quality of this velour witch hat from the 99c Only Store, and thought I’d try to convert it to some other sort of hat, partly because I’ve had luck with having my Costume Class Students turning a bunch of black feather covered witch hats into a series of c.1900 “Edward Gorey” style mourning hats as a class project inspired by having those fairly fancy looking witch hats get dumped by a store in November to less than $1 each. I checked to see if the hat was in fact adult sized in the head…
Continue reading Turning a $1.29 Halloween Witch Hat into a Dickens Era Bonnet“Costumers make clothes for imaginary people” -Celestine Ranney
“Make it pretty and make it work” – Bob Blackman
“Done is good. Done is beautiful” – Pat Lusk
“If you’re going to steal, steal the best” – ?
“It’s probably under something.” Sign in the Living History Center (Northern California Renaissance Fair 1980s) Costume shop.
“It’s a’ learning’ experience” – Mrs. Elzey my H.S. sewing teacher after any disastrous sewing foul up.
Hot glue is good for you: It whitens your teeth and improves your sex life – Pat Lusk
Continue reading Costumer’s Quotes… If you have a sex life – Lorraine Pettit
This page contains my opinions that I posted many years ago to a thread on The Costumer’s Manifesto eGroup about salary and respect issues for costumers. To see other posts by people on this thread, go to the eGroup:
No one seems to have mentioned the key to the low salaries for costumers and other stitchers: It is “Women’s Work”.
The bottom paid job in every country in the world is that of seamstress, and as costuming relates closely to stitching, and is done by a workforce that is 95% female, it is often paid in a similar fashion.
You can look in theatre departments across the US and you will also find that the costume designer is usually the lowest paid faculty, and in many cases is lower paid “staff” when all other positions are tenured faculty. It is rather unusual for the costume designer to feel she is taken as seriously as an artist by directors or other designers. It isn’t unheard of for a costume designer to be rated as an equal, and I’m happy to say UAF is one place where we (the theatre faculty) all agree this is the proper way to do things, but even at UAF, once the level goes up a rung to administration, it isn’t necessarily the case. I’m the only faculty in Theatre with a Ph.D., and yet I’m still lowest paid of those who came in when I did, because our former dean set our incoming salaries when we were hired. Magically, a female costumer was “worth” substantially less than either male stage director, a salary differential that widened as time wore on.
There are lots of things costumers do, even in faculty positions that encourage colleagues to think less of their design skills however. Some things to remember if you want more respect:
Continue reading Salary and Respect Issues in CostumingWhat Follows Is An Article I wrote for College Monthly in 1992 on how to cheaply and effectively travel to a new place. It describes specific things to do to make travel easy and breathtakingly inexpensive.
Three winters ago I left California and got a temporary teaching job at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, where the sun peeks over the Southern horizon a few degrees azimuth for a few hours each day, and seeing the ice-fog and sub-zero temperatures, thinks better of staying too long. During Christmas break all alone, for reasons which are probably obvious, I started to fantasize about travel to warmer and more populated portions of the globe. My favorite fantasy was that the following summer I could go to Paris for the 1789-1989 Bicentennial, an event near and dear to my history-lover’s heart.
TRAVEL IS INSPIRING: While I am tolerably certain that Vaslav Nijinsky and Leon Bakst did not absolutely need to go to Greece to respectively choreograph and design the Ancient Greek themed 1911 ballet Afternoon of a Faun, I’m sure it helped. What is more, I expect that they enjoyed it too. And while the IRS probably (in its wisdom) would have frowned upon them trying to deduct it as a business expense (had they been modern Americans), it is true that travel is one of the best methods for any type of artist to get inspiration.
TRAVEL NEEDN’T BE NICE TO WORK: Travel need not be glamorous or expensive or comfortable to be inspiring. It is a recorded fact that Bertolt Brecht wrote most of the rough scripts for his greatest works (Mother Courage, The Good Woman of Szechwan, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle) while staying in refugee camps during W.W.II, fleeing the Nazis by walking/hitching rides from Germany to Manchuria, going through Stalin’s USSR. True he wrote the smooth finished drafts of these in the comfort of Southern California, but the inspiration, the ideas, they came from a grueling trek across hostile territory in the midst of a war. Travel is good for an artist if it doesn’t kill her.
Please note, if you are getting this out of context, this essay was written as part of a Costumer’s self-help book of advice back in January 1995
“I, MYSELF, AM STRANGE AND UNUSUAL”: Just because I’m giving out advice, please do not assume I am in any way “well-adjusted” or (God forbid) “normal.” I am, and have been, to my earliest memories, one of life’s outcasts. The Weird One. Born as one of those crazy artist people who is oh-so-creative but really, cannot possibly deal with the real world. I do not mean to say I am helpless. Quite the contrary. Being strange and unusual means you are pretty much on your own most of the time, and you get very good in dealing with problems from moving to finances to flat tires on your own. But I am the sort of person who decides to enliven a dull day by going out in a false mustache, monocle and frock coat for the evening. I’ll sit at home, watching the same videotaped TV show over and over while I paint giant twisted faces on canvas night after night. Or write this book in my flat for days, when I should go out shopping, because I think “another day of using newspaper for the toilet won’t be so bad.” So I’m giving advice, not as one of those superior “cured” people, who has found Jesus, or is listening to Prozac or whatever, but as one of the sick crazy people, who wants to remain a costumer, remain strange, remain unusual, because, really, art (self-expression) is more important to me than toilet paper.
Continue reading The Costumer Within
