HOUSTON —
It’s an unusually quiet day in the Houston Ballet costume shop, where the staff just wrapped up Sylvia.
"We're cleaning up after the big push of the past couple of days," explains manager Megan Richardson. "We made well more than 100 costumes for it."
The ballet that tested them in new ways: characters with fins, others with fur and still more decked out in armor.
"It was a big challenge to figure out how to make it flexible enough to partner in, easy enough to get in and out of for quick changes," Richardson says.
She acknowledges costume shop she manages is used to challenges. The job here is to turn the designer’s sketches into wearable art.
"In theater, there’s a script to go by, a road map already drawn for what we’re doing," says Richardson. "With a piece like Sylvia, there’s a story involved, but our choreographer Stanton Welch is going to tell his version of it."
Along with the set and the music, costumes are a vital part of the storytelling process, helping the audience of Sylvia identify which central characters are, for example, a goddess, a warrior or a peasant.
"Then we did our jobs right," Richardson laughs.
In the quiet of the workroom is focus on repairs to finished costumes, on hand-stitching new ones, on cataloging the fabric used for this show and on cutting patterns for the next. And there is always a next one.
"There’s no rest," says Richardson. "We have Robbins rep and we have the Premieres Rep right after that."
The slate of productions means new ideas, new materials, new details and much louder days in the shop.
If you'd like to see those Sylvia costumes in action, click here.
