La Bricoleuse (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
labricoleuse) wrote2007-01-08 06:43 pm
labricoleuse) wrote2007-01-08 06:43 pm
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Review/Analysis: Edward Scissorhands ballet, North American Tour 2007
If you haven't heard about Michael Bourne's ballet reimagining of Tim Burton's film Edward Scissorhands...well, i guess you just did. It's running in Charlotte, NC, through Jan 10th, and then goes on to nine more North American cities over the next four months--Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, DC, St. Louis, Brooklyn, Toronto, St. Paul, Denver, & Seattle. (Sorry, if you live in SF or LA, you already missed it.)
In addition to being a fan of Tim Burton's work and the film version of Edward Scissorhands, this production held particular interest for me professionally: a ballet, essentially, all about a work of costume craft artisanship--the very nature of the main character and the entire story depend upon Edward's hands being made from scissor-blades.
First, here are some stills and video from the production for reference:
All photos by Bill Cooper, used with permission from Digital Entertainment Marketing, Edward Scissorhands North American Tour.
For video of the show, browse the Edward Scissorhands Tour userpage on YouTube. Of particular note is the Topiary Dance, which features a corps of ballet dancers dressed as topiaries, complete with "actual" leafy boxwood branchy bits.
And, if you want to check out the costume renderings by designer Lez Brotherston, they're all in the pictures section on the EST Tour MySpace page.
So, the performance itself was amazing. I highly encourage anyone to go see it, from small children to old grandmas and everyone in between. It's sweet, sad, funny, tragic, excellent. I first saw the film when it came out in theatres back in 1990, in an old art-house cinema in Knoxville, TN (now probably torn down). At the end of the film, my date and i left the theatre and it had begun to snow while we'd been inside--the parking lot was sparkling with new snow falling all around us. It was a really magical thing to happen, given the snow-metaphor of the film ending, and this production captured exactly that kind of "Oh!" weepily-cathartic joy at the end, when probably around 6 snow machines start pumping snow out over the audience during the curtain call.
If the tour comes to your town, or a city near you, go! By all means, go. It's wonderful.
But, this blog is about the nuts and bolts of costume craftwork, so how about if i stop gushing about nostalgia and squee, and get on with it?
Edward's Scissorhands
The scissorblade glove/gauntlet appliances were built by Robert Allsopp & Associates, a props/costumes/effects company located in London. If you explore around on their site, you'll see a lot of familiar stuff (such as Magneto's helmet from the X-Men films, & Nemo's undersea suits from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).
Here's an excerpt on the costuming from an article in the LA Times written by Karen Wada:
"We began by asking, 'What would a boy made by an inventor look like?' " Brotherston says. "What would you make him out of?" His Edward wears what he calls "an anatomical suit stitched out of sofa leather." He and a prop maker struggled to find the right material, size and balance for the hands. In the end they attached 18- to 20-inch blades to spring-loaded gloves that dual leads Sam Archer and Richard Winsor learned to manipulate with the help of a physiotherapist and hours of practice. (In early rehearsals performers wore safety goggles.)
I had pretty much already figured out the fact that the gloves had a spring structural component, by analyzing the desktop-image-sized photographs on the original website. Here is a cropped detail from the closest-up photograph of the appliances, and you can see long springs perhaps 1cm in diameter running along the fingers (think about the kinds of springs you find on old wood-frame screen-doors to keep them closed). The second photo has the springs drawn in yellow.
This of course makes perfect sense from an orthopedic standpoint--it's far easier to grip your hand against a tension than to splay your hands out against resistance. Due to the size of the houses this ballet is playing to, the blades need to be extreme in length in order to read in the nosebleed seats. The weight of the blades, even though they are (presumably) cast in plastic resin, would give the dancer portraying Edward some serious Repetitive Strain Injury if he had to rely on the tendons along the back of his hands to hold the scissorblades outstretched. So, the springs mounted on the leather glove/gauntlet base keep the blades in-line with the dancer's forearm, and to curl them inward or fan them, he curls his fingers in against the tension of the springs. Brilliant!
I do believe that the blades themselves are cast in plastic resin or similar (probably either tinted black or grey), then coated with a chrome finish. The dancer portraying Edward touched them to the ground and various set pieces many times during the performance, and though the music provided "scissor sounds" at times, there was also the audible click of plastic, not metal. (Nevermind that metal would be even more disturbing safety-wise.)
Here's another picture with the positioning of the springs drawn in yellow on the second image:
Edward's Costume
Edward's costume itself was created by Phil Reynolds, the London-based costumier who created Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman costume and Uma Thurman's skin-tight Avengers costume. His studio also produced the Mufasa costume for Julie Taymor's Lion King designs. An aspect of the costuming of craftworthy interest is the surface treatment of Edward's costume. Here's a detail of the best shot of it in the press photos:
Looks like there's a lot of applied pieces of leather &/or vinyl, on presumably some type of 4-way stretch dance-spandex base, with some airbrushed paint effects (like that swirl of ridgey-looking sections down his upper arm). There also appears to be some type of trapunto perhaps on that upper arm, giving it a bit of dimensionality, but perhaps that's just really good airbrush illusion.
Topiary Heads
Reynolds and Allsopp collaborated on the topiary ballet costumes. I couldn't find a really good photograph of the topiary ballet, so hopefully you were able to watch it on YouTube at that link up there. I'm going to take a wild guess on the topiary heads and hazard that they're done something like Leigh Bowery's strange cephalo-obfuscative headdresses:
...a base that fits the head snugly, with some bunchy applied net shaping, covered on the exterior with silk foliage. I guess they could also be buckram shapes or veriform or something, but it seemed like they actually "shivered" a little, like shrubbery branches do in the wind, when the dancers moved in them.
All in all, tons of creative craftwork happening in this show, well-translated from the Burton film and beautifully-rendered by some artisans working at the top of the field. Bravo!
In addition to being a fan of Tim Burton's work and the film version of Edward Scissorhands, this production held particular interest for me professionally: a ballet, essentially, all about a work of costume craft artisanship--the very nature of the main character and the entire story depend upon Edward's hands being made from scissor-blades.
First, here are some stills and video from the production for reference:
All photos by Bill Cooper, used with permission from Digital Entertainment Marketing, Edward Scissorhands North American Tour.
For video of the show, browse the Edward Scissorhands Tour userpage on YouTube. Of particular note is the Topiary Dance, which features a corps of ballet dancers dressed as topiaries, complete with "actual" leafy boxwood branchy bits.
And, if you want to check out the costume renderings by designer Lez Brotherston, they're all in the pictures section on the EST Tour MySpace page.
So, the performance itself was amazing. I highly encourage anyone to go see it, from small children to old grandmas and everyone in between. It's sweet, sad, funny, tragic, excellent. I first saw the film when it came out in theatres back in 1990, in an old art-house cinema in Knoxville, TN (now probably torn down). At the end of the film, my date and i left the theatre and it had begun to snow while we'd been inside--the parking lot was sparkling with new snow falling all around us. It was a really magical thing to happen, given the snow-metaphor of the film ending, and this production captured exactly that kind of "Oh!" weepily-cathartic joy at the end, when probably around 6 snow machines start pumping snow out over the audience during the curtain call.
If the tour comes to your town, or a city near you, go! By all means, go. It's wonderful.
But, this blog is about the nuts and bolts of costume craftwork, so how about if i stop gushing about nostalgia and squee, and get on with it?
Edward's Scissorhands
The scissorblade glove/gauntlet appliances were built by Robert Allsopp & Associates, a props/costumes/effects company located in London. If you explore around on their site, you'll see a lot of familiar stuff (such as Magneto's helmet from the X-Men films, & Nemo's undersea suits from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).
Here's an excerpt on the costuming from an article in the LA Times written by Karen Wada:
"We began by asking, 'What would a boy made by an inventor look like?' " Brotherston says. "What would you make him out of?" His Edward wears what he calls "an anatomical suit stitched out of sofa leather." He and a prop maker struggled to find the right material, size and balance for the hands. In the end they attached 18- to 20-inch blades to spring-loaded gloves that dual leads Sam Archer and Richard Winsor learned to manipulate with the help of a physiotherapist and hours of practice. (In early rehearsals performers wore safety goggles.)
I had pretty much already figured out the fact that the gloves had a spring structural component, by analyzing the desktop-image-sized photographs on the original website. Here is a cropped detail from the closest-up photograph of the appliances, and you can see long springs perhaps 1cm in diameter running along the fingers (think about the kinds of springs you find on old wood-frame screen-doors to keep them closed). The second photo has the springs drawn in yellow.
This of course makes perfect sense from an orthopedic standpoint--it's far easier to grip your hand against a tension than to splay your hands out against resistance. Due to the size of the houses this ballet is playing to, the blades need to be extreme in length in order to read in the nosebleed seats. The weight of the blades, even though they are (presumably) cast in plastic resin, would give the dancer portraying Edward some serious Repetitive Strain Injury if he had to rely on the tendons along the back of his hands to hold the scissorblades outstretched. So, the springs mounted on the leather glove/gauntlet base keep the blades in-line with the dancer's forearm, and to curl them inward or fan them, he curls his fingers in against the tension of the springs. Brilliant!
I do believe that the blades themselves are cast in plastic resin or similar (probably either tinted black or grey), then coated with a chrome finish. The dancer portraying Edward touched them to the ground and various set pieces many times during the performance, and though the music provided "scissor sounds" at times, there was also the audible click of plastic, not metal. (Nevermind that metal would be even more disturbing safety-wise.)
Here's another picture with the positioning of the springs drawn in yellow on the second image:
Edward's Costume
Edward's costume itself was created by Phil Reynolds, the London-based costumier who created Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman costume and Uma Thurman's skin-tight Avengers costume. His studio also produced the Mufasa costume for Julie Taymor's Lion King designs. An aspect of the costuming of craftworthy interest is the surface treatment of Edward's costume. Here's a detail of the best shot of it in the press photos:
Looks like there's a lot of applied pieces of leather &/or vinyl, on presumably some type of 4-way stretch dance-spandex base, with some airbrushed paint effects (like that swirl of ridgey-looking sections down his upper arm). There also appears to be some type of trapunto perhaps on that upper arm, giving it a bit of dimensionality, but perhaps that's just really good airbrush illusion.
Topiary Heads
Reynolds and Allsopp collaborated on the topiary ballet costumes. I couldn't find a really good photograph of the topiary ballet, so hopefully you were able to watch it on YouTube at that link up there. I'm going to take a wild guess on the topiary heads and hazard that they're done something like Leigh Bowery's strange cephalo-obfuscative headdresses:
...a base that fits the head snugly, with some bunchy applied net shaping, covered on the exterior with silk foliage. I guess they could also be buckram shapes or veriform or something, but it seemed like they actually "shivered" a little, like shrubbery branches do in the wind, when the dancers moved in them.
All in all, tons of creative craftwork happening in this show, well-translated from the Burton film and beautifully-rendered by some artisans working at the top of the field. Bravo!
no subject
Thanks for the heads up. :D I am so there.
no subject
no subject
What an amazinly well researched piece!
You might want to drop by our Website (again) at http://www.edwardscissorhandstour.com. We have a very cute photo of Johnny Depp examining one of the "scissorblades". Bet he was thinking..."Hmm, that's a fine set of spring-loaded scissors."
We are just finishing our run at the Kennedy Center. Next stop the "Fabulous" Fox Theatre in St. Louis.
no subject
I'm adding a link from my entry (which...is just a quick 'squee' after seeing the performance yesterday *g*)
Great Shots!
(Anonymous) 2008-06-18 07:40 am (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2010-10-24 12:24 pm (UTC)(link)