Costuming

The cast of the touring production with the travelling medallion in the background. Photo courtesy of Suzanne Ostersmith

Costumes for this first production were designed by a student and realized by our staff costume manager with her student crew. The costumes were traditional long vests worn over tunics. 

The vests were reversible with different colors and fabrics on each side so when they were turned inside out they could represent different characters. With this design there was a unity among the cast, but they still appeared to be individual women. But there was another elemental piece of fabric that was used to tell our stories.

The question of footwear arises in every production, and in the first three Weaving Our Sisters' Voices productions, each one was different. Since we would be performing in various locations during the 2006 tour, shoes were vital. However, a typical leather jazz shoe didn’t seem hearty enough or time appropriate. My colleague and head of costuming, Summer Berry, shared a dance footwear catalogue with me, and I realized the best case scenario would be laced Grecian Sandals. It seemed crazy extravagant ($30 a pair) to purchase shoes for each of the performers, but the look was perfect. Summer ordered the shoes and confirmed that it would complete the costume design.     

The complete costume for the touring production. Photo courtesy of Suzanne Ostersmith.

In all this excitement of design, the weight of costumes was never a consideration. But once we were touring, it was quite evident. The fabric choices hung nicely on the performer’s bodies but also added weight. The many layers (pants, over dresses, vests, blue fabric) were a lot to carry in and of themselves, but we also had a sound system and circular logo set pieces to manage. So for future touring performances I knew to take the weight of costuming and props into consideration.

The design process for the 2015 production began that summer, and one of the great delights in preparing for the new production was the blessing of getting to work with a new design team. Leslie Stamoolis had just completed her first year as the Costuming Professor at Gonzaga and had done the design for me for Jesus Christ Superstar. We met for dinner to begin discussing our ideas.

I had seen a piece of dance earlier that spring at the American College Dance Conference at Northern Colorado University, and the costumes were all white. There was something about it that I found haunting, but not angelic. We began our discussion with the practicalities of the production. My intention was to have nine to sixteen company members costumed in a monochromatic, diaphanous look. At that point I was still very much of the mind that I would have the opportunity to cast all strong, trained dancers and that I was going to push the work far more in a choreographic way, so I was encouraging ‘dance like’ costuming. She shared a desire to create her own textile using weaving. As she said, we would be missing a grand opportunity if we didn’t do some weaving in some way. She went away to do the visual research.

Leslie shared about how she was pondering the pallet and had collected photos from the location that had a specific look with colors. Then she was driving through the Palouse near Spokane and she was taken aback by the same color pallet! She enthusiastically shared what she had found with the look of wheat fields in the Palouse, and together we got excited about a little mantra of “Wheat not White.” This directed much of what she chose with the fabrics used for weaving the dresses. Her final design included many colors from the wheat fields, made from fabric constructed of natural fibers. It was fun to see the costumes developing on the dress forms in the costume shop, and I particularly liked that they weren’t overly tidy in appearance. Because of the fabrics she chose, the edges frayed and created some life along the open sides of the weaving.