Tag Archives: Chekhov

Rendering, Teaching

Costume Class Project: 3 Renderings for “The Marriage Proposal”

Step 1

Using the data you found in the Historical Research Project incorporate your research into designs for the three characters in Anton Chekhov’s one act farce The Marriage Proposal. You need not follow the research slavishly, but the evidence of your sources should be apparent in your drawings. Then label your drawings something like this:

If you have difficulty drawing figures, you can print out some of the outline sheets below, and do your renderings on these sheets. Printing the sheet onto card stock will allow you to use watercolors without having the paper wrinkle

Another way of Making rendering easier is to make a “Dancing Man”:

Make this out of heavy card stock, connect the pieces with brads as shown in the center, and lay it on your paper to make different poses for your body-outlines.

Whenever you have spare time this semester, teach yourself more about rendering by going to this links page for more lessons.

Step 2

Scan and post the images you drew to your files section and post a notification on the message board that you have done renderings for this play and would appreciate feedback from the other students.

Teaching

Costume Class Project: Visual Historical Research for a Play

Costume 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.

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