Balaclavas and newsprint

As you may have now guessed this is in part, a large part at that, a retrospective blog. Which is making it a little weird for me cos I keep jumping between past, present, first and third person. Kinda leaving my head spinning.

Anyway, back to the online time-warp that is my blog.

Ahh, the fun bit. Well its all fun really, but this part of the project is the part I really enjoy getting my teeth into as its the first time I start to see the skin of the piece. I do however feel I may have actually taken on more costume designers than I know what to do with! 

Where to start, well as with The Booger Dance the costumes will begin with photographs of real people based in and around where I live in sunny south easy London. My daily route to the studio on my much loved 1984 Raleigh Routier takes me through the back streets of Camberwell, Peckham and into Bermondsey. Over the last two years I have begun accruing a near Encyclopedic memory bank of characters, encounters, dramas and micro performances played out on the streets of my daily commute. Sometimes I'm lucky enough to have a camera on me, but more often than not and due to its inconspicuous nature I now tend to rely on my trust iPhone 4GS. 

I have decided on three being the magic number for my number of tribes/clans I want to make and for the worlds/stages I want to build for them to inhabit. With The Booger Dance I made a cast of 7 characters all based on different people and all looking very different. This time around I want to unite three groups by making them all share the same costume, and to a greater or lesser extent their choreography. 

I would like each tribe to have some kind of leader figure, depicted by a variant or embellished version of the groups costume, or to see it another way the tribes costume is to be a diluted version of the leaders costume, at least that the ambition.

The next costumes I need to make are the Mudhead masks themselves. These have already been on somewhat of an evolutionary trajectory since their beginnings on Mudcircles. Salt-dough whilst looking amazing is fairly impractical as a mask materials. Expanding foam with iron ore pigment is better, but a little uncontrollable and on the big side.

My next stop is self skinning two part polyurethane foam as used in theatre, tv and LARPing to produce props of all shapes and sizes. I am needless to say very excited about working with this stuff. My plan is simple. Balaclava, foam, pigment, cake icer, mess, mask, done.

Snug fit, I like it! And so, the production line begins...

 

So to backtrack from here, the first point of call for any costume design process is to meet and debrief your designers. 18 cups of tea later, this is done and dusted. Next stop, pencils, pens and one massive pile of newsprint. Whilst this is going on I am still racing off on my bike to Peckham, Bermondsey and Camberwell on the look out for more interesting characters to use as inspiration for costumes, something I should probably have settled on long ago. With some hastily printed pictures from my aperture library, a mountain of books and some scribbles in my many sketchbooks as reference material the process of designing some costumes begin in ernest. These are just some of the drawings that survived.

 
 
 

Important to note here that rehearsals have already taken place, i.e performers have little to no opportunity to see their costumes until the day of the shoot. In affect  turning the shoot into a very risky, elaborate, filmed rehearsal. Not as I had planned, but this seems to be the way this process always happens, back to front!

After lots of drawing (most of which is better than these poor efforts) I settled on these. Happily we all moved forwards.