Here are the base costume ideas I have been playing with. A long robe, slate gray in color with a removable bunraku hood. The costumes would be distressed and treated to emulate the look of a well-used chalkboard.
Month: September 2012
Costume Ideas
There are several costume ideas I have been working on since my meeting with Rinde. We had talked about the actors wearing costumes that unified them and referenced Ningyōtsukai (Bunraku Puppeteers) and their style of dress. I also like the unified look of the Butoh performers. One of the many style of Ningyōtsukai hoods made from a square piece of fabric creates the effect of wolf ears!
Along with this element of costume I imagined the actors altering their ‘blank’ costumes with the use of chalk in primal and gestural ways like Native American warpaint. As the play progresses, the costumes would move from stark and clean to this chalk covered second skin. then the costumes would be washed between each performance. I am still experimenting on what this might look like.
Another element I have been working in is creating character through costume pieces and accessories made out of paper. The heavy builders paper comes readily in Brown, Pink, and Green. I have been experimenting with making simple costume pieces out of paper and made a pretty nice fedora hat. I also have been looking at how fashion has used paper as costume and especially like the Hugo Boss Paper suit from the 1960’s
Chalk could also be used on the paper costume pieces to add details, but these would not very very easy to clean off for each performance.
Finally I have a strong image of tall two-dimensional paper puppets of business suits or suited “shareholders” casting long shadows around the campfire. The ‘suits’ would be tall and abstracted, serving as the image of both suited shareholders but also the tall skyscrapers of the world Calub Prosper now lives in. Since the puppets are flat they could easily blend into the play space when not in use and only make an appearance for particular moments.
That is what I have thus far. I hope to do some drawings and make a mockup of the tall puppet for the meeting. Let me know what you all think!
Wesleyan Music Department Colloquium with Rinde Eckert
On Wednesday, September 12 at 4:15pm, Rinde Eckert will lead the colloquium for the music department at Wesleyan University. This event is free and open to both Wesleyan students and the general public. Come hear Rinde discuss talk about his relationship to music and his new theatrical work The Last Days of the Old Wild Boy, which will premiere at Wesleyan from November 15-17, 2012.
Campfires
From the perspective of the campfire the dark is only dark. From the hidden-ness of the dark however, everything in the world is seen and sensed. The camper is blinded by the light, the wolf not.
We tell stories here in our blindness and, perhaps, we come to put more faith in them than we do the world of shadows, the real world just beyond the light of the fire
We step toward the campfire and the world becomes small, enlarged only in the telling of it, ourselves becoming the world in this weaving. As we step back into the shadows, the campfire becomes another place among infinite places.
It’s a dangerous seduction this fire, offering us illumination, heat, comfort, security, isolation, illusion, and distraction in the all consuming fire, its smoke clouding the air, its smell crowding out other smells, the signs of life, smell of wolf, bear, beaver, the perfume of sumac, pine, peat
And yet in these fantasies the world is recreated. We are little gods by virtue of the fire, tempted to believe, as we are, that our small worlds are all that is most real, larger than life.
Back and Blogging
I’m back after a short hiatus in the wilds of Minnesota (a writers retreat called Norm’s Fish Camp up near the Boundary Waters. Still typing in the stuff from my notebook. But I’ll post a few new musings later today. See you all in a few days when the process begins.