Some exciting images from a new project with Cori Olinghouse, Ghost Lines.
…looking for new ways to rehearse and understand what we’re creating…
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/27151530 w=725&h=408]
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[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/27090425 w=725&h=408]
Directed by Cori Olinghouse
Improvisations by Cori Olinghouse and Eva Schmidt
Costume/ Photography by Andy Jordan
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October was a busy month. Lots of costumes flying around. But that’s kind of my thing…
Not only was I building looks for many people and helping friends with their Halloween costumes, I myself was playing dress up too. A good friend sent me this image and I think it’s an appropriate metaphor for what happened to me late in the month:
Many people I talk to in the field of costume design say that they never make anything for themselves, that they spend too much time making for others that they have no interest in making for themselves. Somehow I still find a thrill in transforming myself into something else. And I hope I can hold on to this. But it takes work. And sometimes I work too much. (Actually I always work too much.) And sometimes I’m a broke down mess. (Not always!)
I wore an Electro-Glam look for the Bowie Ball on October 10th
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A lot of time was spent working with other artists at Izquierdo Studio on robotic armor for Heidi Klum. Martin Izquierdo designed the amazing look, complete with built in stilts and chrome breasts. I respect Heidi’s desire to have a unique custom built costume every year for her Halloween party. I’d like to see a movement towards a more couture halloween.
This photo was taken during a fitting at the studio.
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For Halloween weekend I had big plans to be a skeletal bat. But Saturday night hit and I wasn’t done! Luckily there are lots of bits and pieces from past projects circulating in my world. With a borrow here and some scraps from there I became a llama. Which paired well with my friend Matthew’s creepy monkey costume. (Yikes!)
Monkey & Llama, pet us.
And for Sunday night, actual Halloween, I finished up my bat skeleton just in time to head out. ( A friend actually sewed me into the suit on the subway…)
My friend Sam was a dragon and I was a dead bat
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This photo is from a costume fitting for choreographer Cori Olinghouse. Cori asked me to design looks for a super interesting piece called The Animal Suite: Experiments in Vaudeville and Shapeshifting. The piece brings together movement from vogueing, vaudeville and silent clowning, which Cori has woven together exploring the concept of eccentric dance. After seeing the dancer move in his costumes I know we are onto something good!
Buster Keaton inspiration
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Soon I’m starting work on some new costumes for my friend and collaborator (and epic-maker) Christopher Williams. We’re taking the first steps in an an exciting new project, an opera based on medieval Welsh mythology. I’ve read an early draft of the libretto that Christopher has written and it’s incredible. (!)
An excerpt will be shown in February at the Joyce theater… Photos from our last collaboration can be seen HERE.
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I’ll post more on the last two topics as they develop
talk soon,
_A
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A dear friend of mine has inspired and encouraged me to start blogging again. And so, not without some apprehension, I begin. (Hoping to avoid polluting the internet with an esoteric trail of hedonistic self-absorbed residue.)
At the time of this writing I’m focusing most of my energy on a collaboration with my choreographer friend Christopher Williams. I’m designing and building some fairly elaborate costumes for Christopher’s two new piece “Gobbledygook” and “Hen’s Teeth.”
I can’t share too much yet about how they will look. Not until the piece opens. But I’ll share sneaky glimpses of things as they form. Like this webcam shot of me working on a full body reliquary costume:
The blurb for Hen’s Teeth:
Incorporating imagery of the mysterious flying women found in a Breton fairytale preserved by 19th century folklorist François-Marie Luzel, the Graeae, or three swan-like crones of ancient Greek myth who share only one eye and one tooth between them, and that associated with the display of holy relics in the middle ages, Hen’s Teeth is a work for three middle-aged women, six younger women, and one man set to to contemporary music by Gregory Spears in the form of a requiem mass sung in Breton, Latin, and French by members of Lionheart and Anonymous 4 that incorporates elements of the homophonic chanson Cigne ie suis de candeur by Claude Le Jeune (c. 1528-1600)
More info at:
http://www.christopherwilliamsdance.org/performances.php
