Fun with Spray Paint and Freezer Paper!

Hi Everyone!  I can't say that I have ever used my blog to share a technique before, but I think I may have discovered something that other costumers might want to borrow, so I took step-by-step photos and decided to share it here.

First let me give you a little background information.  I have always relied heavily on various dying techniques in my designs, but in my current position at American Repertory Ballet, the shop doesn't have a facility that accommodates my messy habit!  I did however, inherit a huge collection of spray paints and these have become my new tool!  These aren't special paints, some are Krylon paints from the hardware store and some are Shoe Magix.  They all work just the same!  (I used to work as a silk screener, so I have always been fascinated by adding color to fabric.)

 One of our new ballets hasn't been allocated a budget just yet, so I have been creating costumes from 'free' fabric leftover from other projects or donated to us.  I am designing costumes for forest-dwelling fairies, and since I was told that fairies are gatherers, I have just been gathering what I can from within our shop.  The costumes above were made with 'found' fabric with interesting patterns and textures.  I also found some pretty ordinary mint green mesh and decided to figure out a way to add similar interest with a ginko leaf design motif.  Here is what you can do with freezer paper and spray paint:

Step 1: Draw designs onto freezer paper.  I folded the freezer paper several times to expedite the process.

Step 2: Cut out your designs.  (On the left is the boring mint-green mesh that is about to be painted!)

Step 3: Arrange your freezer paper designs on your fabric waxy side down.  With a dry warm iron (no steam), press the paper down; the wax will affix the paper to the fabric.  The paper becomes a 'resist' for the paint.  It is like stenciling in reverse.

Step 4: Find a place that is well-ventilated for spray painting.  If you are lucky, you have a spray booth; I am using nature for fresh air!  Lay out your fabric on plastic to protect the grass.  Then begin spraying your fabric with a sweeping motion to mist on color.  I used green at the top, brown in the center, and deep yellow at the bottom.

ooooh....here we go....

Step 5: After 3-5 minutes of dry time, peel your freezer paper designs off of the fabric.  Exciting!  My experiment worked!!!

Step 6: Try to think of a use for all of the wonderful spray-painted pieces of freezer paper you now have!  I know, I will decorate my bulletin board for fall!

Step 7: Sew your pretty spray-painted fabric into whatever your heart desires!

(Its a little fairy tunic)

 

American Repertory Ballet

Our Front Door

photo by Brianna McIntyre

Hi Everyone! Long time no post!

Well, after more than a dozen years in academia and freelancing, I decided it was time to settle down for a year or so and sign a long-term contract. I am so glad I did! In September 2011, I became the company wardrobe supervisor and resident designer for American Repertory Ballet. If you scroll through this blog, you will see I have actually been intermittently affiliated with the company since 2005 when I had a great time designing ballets like an 1830s version of Beauty and the Beast and a 1920s-meets-the-1980s version of Cinderella. So having the opportunity to return to take on every aspect of costuming the company was a great joy!

American Repertory Ballet is headed by Artistic Director Douglas Martin. We work in a lovely studio designed by architect Ralph Lerner. I am lucky to work with a production team that is largely women...a rarity at this level! The dancers are also a delightful, cohesive group of professionals and I look forward to seeing them every day. Our schedule is rigorous. The company produces a huge array of programs of both mixed repertory and full-length works, including a massive touring Nutcracker. Producing this volume of work, in addition to the adventure of accompanying the company from venue to venue, is most definitely expanding my multi-tasking aptitude! To give you a sense of the pace of the work, I designed and built three full-company works in just the first five weeks of my contract! One was made by Douglas Martin especially for the Career Transitions for Dancers Gala at New York's City Center. (The event was sponsored by Rolex but I think they forgot to give me my Rolex - it must be in the mail!)

Below is a random assortment of photos from the past few months. Conspicuously absent are Nutcracker photos. Its not that I don't love the Nutcracker - well, as much as anyone in this business can love it (wink wink) - its just that I've been promising to make a whole post just dedicated to all sorts of Nutcracker fun...and someday I really will!

The company in Mary Barton's Straight Up with a Twist
photo by Pete Cook

David & K.L. in the Balcony pas de deux from Douglas Martin's Romeo and Juliet (a work in progress)
Photos by Leighton Chen

David and Claire (top) & Monica and Alice (above) in Trinette Singleton's Capriccios
Photos by George Jones (top) & Leighton Chen (above)

Alex in Mary Barton's Five Men in a Concerto
Photo by George Jones

Career Transitions for Dancers Gala promotional poster
New York City Center - October 31st, 2011

Douglas Martin's Pathways
Photo courtesy of Rolex Watch USA and CTFD

A Lovely Photo in the New York Times

Its always nice to discover a photo of your work in The New York Times. The Times recently published this lovely photograph by Julieta Cervantes of costumes I designed in 2010 for Robert Battle's Channels.

The photo accompanied a review of the Alvin Ailey School's Spring Celebrations Concert in print in the New York edition on May 28, 2011. The performance was favorably reviewed by Roslyn Sulcas, and it is especially nice that she mentioned the costumes. You can read an online version of the review here.

"Process" and the NYPL Digital Gallery

"All this while I sat upon the ground, very much terrified and dejected."
N.C. Wyeth
Mid-Manhattan Library / Picture Collection
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?1697940

This spring I had the pleasure of working with a young choreographer named Dusan Tynek. Dusan was born in the Czech Republic but has established himself as New York City-based choreographer and company director of notable skill and promise. After I met with Dusan to discuss the new piece he was creating, I also became aware that we have something in common - an interest in local cultures, history, and folklore. Dusan told me he was creating a new piece called Widow's Walk. The term refers to an architectural detail that is often observable in homes in coastal communities, particularly in New England. A 'widow's walk' is a square, railed observation platform located on the roof from which the horizon can be scanned for returning ships. The romantic nature of the name suggests the dangers associated with maritime life.

"Widow'sWalk II"
Rob Gonsalves

Working with Dusan gave me the opportunity to use a resource that is truly a treasure to every designer - the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery. The NYPL has always been a favorite resource of designers based in the city. When I was an undergraduate student 15 years ago, using this resource entailed making a trip to the Mid-Manhattan Library branch and searching through files of clippings and color plates pasted onto card stock. When you checked them out, you were given a green folio to take them home in. Seeing someone carrying one of those signature folios likely meant they were a fellow designer or art student that couldn't afford their own research materials. Now, the entire collection (and so much more) has been digitized and is accessible to all.

I used the digital gallery to suggest a color pallete for the piece. Here are the images that inspired me and the resulting sketches and swatches.

The Men:

Whaler Rowing a Boat
Mid-Manhattan Library / Picture Collection
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?834485


The Wives:

"Momoyogusa = Flowers of a Hundred Generations"
Sekka Kamisaka (Japanese 1909)
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building / Spencer Collection
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?1269916


The Swimmers:

Greenland whale ; Sperm whale
From Naturgeschichte der Säugethiere : mit colorirten Abbildungen zum Anschauugs-Unterricht für die Jugend. (Esslingen : Schreiber, 1872) Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich von (1780-1860), Author.
Mid-Manhattan Library / Picture Collection
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?823817

Lighting is the costume...

Here are some photos I took backstage at Thursday's tech rehearsal for Alwin Nikolais's Crucible, restaged by Alberto (Tito) Del Saz and Peter Kyle with funding provided by the National Endowment for the Arts' American Masterpieces grant.

Nikolais = Genius. Amazing and breathtaking.

Things I did in 2010

Hello dear friends, in effort to keep this blog going as my digital portfolio, I have some new images to upload. But first things first...

2010 was a very busy year, but not so much due to design work (I just kept my regular gigs), but because I branched out to use my graduate degree for what it was intended - teaching history! I started teaching two courses at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey: "Early American Civilization" and "Recent American History". What do costume design and American history have in common? Well, a whole lot if you are a designer of plays and period pieces, but not so much if you primarily design for concert dance like I do! I know its funny to be an aspiring historian using design as a steady job (usually its the other way around), but I am fascinated by American culture - particularly material and popular culture, and as I always tell my students, history isn't about memorizing a series of facts, its a tool to understand the society you live in - how you fit into it, and how you can change it. Luckily, I love both of my vocations, I could never give up either one! Now, onto the designs...

Let's start exactly a year ago in February 2010. Time Lapse Dance celebrated its 10th anniversary season at Tribeca Performing Arts Center! As I mentioned in my last blog post, Jody [Sperling] received a grant from the STREB Lab for Action Mechanics' Emerging Artist Commissioning Program to create a Loie Fuller-inspired aerial piece. Jody has been performing on the trapeze for a number of years now, but for this project she recruited aerialist/contortionist/ballerina Rachel Salzman to perform in a harness. Imagine engineering the voluminous amount of fabric involved in a Loie Fuller-inspired costume around a harness but somehow also keeping that voluminous costume from wrapping around the cable suspending the dancer as she spins, flips, and flies!?!? With teamwork (and trial and error), we managed to do it - and the results were just breathtaking! Here is a picture of Rachel performing in Jody Sperling's Satellite.

Satellite by Jody Sperling
Photo: David Gonsier

At the same performance, dancers from Barnard and Columbia University joined the company as guests to perform a revised version of a work called Ghosts. I just love this picture of the students!

Ghosts Revisited by Jody Sperling
Photo: David Gonsier

Shortly after finishing up with Time Lapse Dance, things got underway at Marymount. Spring is a very busy time for the Dance Department at Marymount because that is when we host all of our guest artists. My favorite project of the semester was designing a new work for Robert Battle called Channels. Channels was a different kind of piece than I've seen Robert do before and it evolved over the course of a year, giving me plenty of time to think about it. I wanted the costumes to respond both to lyrical and percussive movements, and I wanted to evoke the feeling of a soloist working with a chorus (like in a Greek drama). I also wanted the silhouette of the costume to reflect some of the major shapes inscribed in the choreography: angles and semi-circular arches. (You can kind of see the idea from these beautiful photographs taken by Rosalie O'Connor.)

Channels by Robert Battle
Photos: Rosalie O'Connor

As we were finishing up Channels it was announced that Robert will become the new Artistic Director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in July 2011. It is so nice when good things happen to good people, and given that this was my fourth time working with Robert I can honestly say that he is a good and kind man, and I am so pleased to have met him on his "way up." Congratulations Mr. Robert Battle - you will be great at your new job!

Channels by Robert Battle
Photo: Rosalie O'Connor

A second guest artist that created a new work at Marymount was Benoit-Swan Pouffer of Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet. Mr. Pouffer brought his own designer, Nancy Bae, to work with us and this was such a wonderful experience for me. Nancy comes from the world of fashion (and knitting!) - she is in charge of sweater designs at the GAP - and she is an amazing artist! It was fascinating to help her realize her design, which melded dance wear with improvisational hand-knitting, hand-dyeing, and deconstruction. Thank you Nancy for coming to Marymount! Here is a fantastic picture taken by Rosalie O'Connor of the piece titled "For All of Us" with Nancy's costumes (don't you LOVE the crochet with the semi-transparent mesh - so beautiful!)

For All of Us by Benoit-Swan Pouffer
Photo: Rosalie O'Connor
Costume Design: Nancy Bae

Summer was a very busy time too - I designed and built costumes for a new work of choreography by Katherine Duke for the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, and then I celebrated Christmas in July with my good friend Gina Ricca who designed a new Nutcracker and had me build some of the costumes! Unfortunately, I don't have photos right now...but I do hope to get around to writing a post about the various Nutcracker costumes I've built over the years, because its a whole bunch!

Fall came very quickly and I was nervous about starting my new teaching job, but I was also happy to have the opportunity to design for two faculty members at Marymount whom I've never worked with before. Alessandra Prosperi is a lovely dancer/choreographer working in the Graham tradition; she choreographed a piece titled Satsang and provided great guidance with her costumes. I also had the assistance of a student design major named Cinzia Mungo, so I was working with two women with beautiful Italian names at the same time! Thank you to Alessandra and Cinzia for making it such a delightful experience, and a special thank you to Eduardo Patino, the extremely skillful dance photographer who took these photos and gave me permission to publish them here on my blog.

Satsang by Alessandra Prosperi
Photographer: Eduardo Patino, NYC

The second choreographer that I felt lucky to work with in the fall was Jeff Shade. Jeff choreographs and directs musical theater, and he is a generous and upbeat person. When I found out that we would be working together, I knew I would be outside of my design 'comfort zone' but Jeff was very supportive and I think we made a successful team! Jeff's piece was a fun jazz number about the crazy dream scenarios that we all have when we are asleep - like running and running but not being able to get where you are going. The theme of the costumes was 'technicolor pajamas.' (On a somewhat related note, I have this recurring dream where I walk into my 10th grade math class with no shirt on, and I figure if I play it cool, no one will notice - but luckily, me and Jeff are more tasteful than that!) A design major also assisted me on these costumes, her name is Elise Vanderkley and she is such an asset to the Theatre Department at Marymount; I felt lucky to 'borrow' her for the Dance Department! Thanks also to Mr. Eduardo Patino for this picture.

Got Dreams? by Jeff Shade
Photographer: Eduardo Patino, NYC

Well friends, thank you so much for visiting with me on my blog! I wish you a wonderful 2011 and I hope you will come back soon.

I just wanted to remind everyone about Time Lapse Dance's upcoming 10th anniversary performances at Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Feb. 19th-21st, 2010.

The photo is dancer-aerialist Rachel Salzman rehearsing for Jody Sperling's "Satellite" at the Streb Lab for Action Mechanics. (Photo by David Gonsier) You can read about this project and more Time Lapse Dance fun in my previous post. Please come!