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Now that the theatre season and the academic year have ended, i've picked up a couple weeks of overhire work at the Carolina Ballet on their last production of their season, a double bill of Beauty and the Beast and Beethoven's 9th Symphony. I hadn't worked on ballet costumes since my stint at the Boston Ballet back in 1998, and it's been interesting to get back into that whole mindset and realm of costume concerns.
One of the primary crafts needs of a ballet company is coloration of footwear. Shoes are a concern in all types of dance performance, but the aesthetic tradition of ballet has a very specific set of variables to deal with. All the shoes must exactly match the dancers' tights, to help maintain the seamless visual line of the leg/foot in performance. Each dancer has a specific preference in footwear--style, material, brand--which must be tracked and adhered to across the spectrum of costume needs. Standard ballet slippers may be leather or various weaves and fiber contents of cloth, and then there are pointe shoes to consider. For a large professional dance company, shoe stock and their tracking and coloring alone can be a staff position in and of itself.
The Carolina Ballet is a sizable professional company, but their budgets and programming are not such that they can employ a full-time shoe specialist--they typically handle shoe needs in-house except on large new-build works like this Beethoven piece. So this is where i come in as an overhire craftsperson and dyer!
( Read more... )
One of the primary crafts needs of a ballet company is coloration of footwear. Shoes are a concern in all types of dance performance, but the aesthetic tradition of ballet has a very specific set of variables to deal with. All the shoes must exactly match the dancers' tights, to help maintain the seamless visual line of the leg/foot in performance. Each dancer has a specific preference in footwear--style, material, brand--which must be tracked and adhered to across the spectrum of costume needs. Standard ballet slippers may be leather or various weaves and fiber contents of cloth, and then there are pointe shoes to consider. For a large professional dance company, shoe stock and their tracking and coloring alone can be a staff position in and of itself.
The Carolina Ballet is a sizable professional company, but their budgets and programming are not such that they can employ a full-time shoe specialist--they typically handle shoe needs in-house except on large new-build works like this Beethoven piece. So this is where i come in as an overhire craftsperson and dyer!
( Read more... )
