Two friends and I made and hand sequinned these costumes for the band Das Kitten.
Aerial is a new site-specific installation by Baptiste Debombourg at an old Benedictine monastery called Brauweiler Abbey near Cologne, Germany. Debombourg used numerous sheets of shattered laminate glass to mimic a frothy flood of water rushing into a room.
So today we had a welding workshop. Everyone, including yours truly was terrified (and that’s no understatement I assure you) but after the first go I really enjoyed it and apparently I did really well. Who knew I had a hidden talent for welding…?!
The Royal Court
On Thursday we went and visited the Royal Court theatre. It was fab to see the full size theatre of the model boxes we’ve been making for a week.
The set that was in the theatre at the moment means that the stage is being used in a different way, but we could still see what we had been making, which was quite exciting. Unfortunately all the photos I took came out really blurry, but it was a great experience.
Even though I had made a model box for my final project last year, I really struggled to make this one.
I got it in the end though, and even though it really isn’t my best work, at least I have a space to work with and put my designs in.
So our new project, and final project this year, is to design the set and costumes for either The Insect Play by Capek or the opera The Cunning Little Vixen by Janacek. Even though the opera is beautiful, the story is slightly complicated so I have chosen to do The Insect Play as I think I’ll have more scope for design.
At the moment though, we are making model boxes of the Royal Court Theatre as that is the theatre we are ‘designing’ for.
We didn’t end up using the ‘halo’ in the end, Naomi spent a whole day binding the edges and then our designer decided she didn’t want it… But the whole costume worked really well in the end, and Ruby looked so amazing as Lauretta.
As with the set project, this part of the project reaffirmed the fact that I really don’t want to do the making side of things, I just love the designing and model making!
The final show, it was fab!! More photos of Lauretta to follow.
I needed to make a skull cap for Lauretta, and after much discussion and research we decided to make it out of sinamay, fabric that is used for hat making. It was quite tough because the skull cap had to be tight but it couldn’t be wrinkled, so I spent a good few hours pulling at the sinamay on the head block.
