The End of the Road

May 29, 2017May 29, 2017 Emma Jane Haigh Costume Designer Costume Design, final performance, kalopsia

After months and months of the most intense process I have ever put myself through, Kalopsia comes to an end. I’m so pleased I had the chance to throw myself at such a rewarding project at the very end of my degree.

I took on a role which was completely new to me. Being Costume Designer has been extremely challenging at times, exhausting, time consuming and emotionally exhausting.

But OVERALL, more than anything it’s been an absolute pleasure. Seeing the professional photographs and hearing people’s kind feedback have made the entire experience so worth the hours of work I have thrown at it through the process. It has taught me that I am perhaps more creative than I first thought I was.

I couldn’t submit my final post without mentioning what a wonderful team I have worked with whilst creating Kalopsia. As The Pin Hinge Collective I feel we really put everything we had into our show and I’d really like to think that our hard work came across.

Our show changed and developed a lot during the process as we continued to better and fine-tune our understanding of who we are as a company. I feel that we began the process trying to capture too many ideas and by the end of the process we had sieved our ideas right down to create a much more clear and concise performance.

We sculpted the show to fit with our company’s ethos. The show remained about what makes us human and what makes us each unique individuals.

If we had the chance to begin the process again, I would try to balance my production role with my secondary acting role more. I feel like I could have spent more time working on my character and making sure I really knew her inside out. I would also have tried to come to a final show idea sooner than we did, I feel that if we had had more time to work on our final idea, our show could have been even stronger.

Thank you to the rest of The Pin Hinge Collective for helping me to finish my degree with a bang! I really couldn’t have done it without the lot of you.

A More Direct Direction

April 3, 2017May 29, 2017 Emma Jane Haigh Costume Designer Costume Design, Delusions, Office

After much careful consideration and many group discussions over breakfast, the name of our show has finally been decided!

Kalopsia. noun. The delusion of things being more beautiful than they are.

Although we have come to a decision with the show name, we have been struggling to make sense of the direction of the show’s content and meaning. We all loved the idea of love as the centre of our show but we have been finding it difficult to sculpt it into something visually interesting to watch. After a discussion between our Director and Stage Manager, we came up with a completely new concept which fit with the connotations attached to our show title. We have carefully considered the concept of people’s delusions being more beautiful than their situation in the real world. After a group meeting about the new idea, we all feel much more confident about the direction of the show.

The Office…

The show is going to be set in a modern day office. There are targets to meet, fierce competition, a handyman and a stressed-out boss.

The Delusions…

Each of the characters have their own internal goals, thoughts or dreams. The idea is to sprinkle these delusions throughout the piece.

We want the show to follow a traditional narrative with the delusion sections shown through contemporary means.

Considering Costume

With a concrete show idea in place, I feel that I am in a good place to keep thinking about the costume we will need for the show. With each character needing office wear and a costume change for their delusion, I will need to think about a few things:

How will the character change into their delusion costume and can this be done on stage?
How much of a costume change does there need to be and does the entire costume need to change to show the switch from real life to delusion?
Where am I going to source these costumes from?

We decided from the beginning that we don’t want to hide anything from our audience. I will think carefully about how to make the costume changes as simple as possible. I hope our transitions will have the potential to be done in plain sight of the audience; for this to happen I will need to make the delusion costumes minimal with a high-impact.

All You Need is Love – We’re Only Human After All

February 25, 2017May 29, 2017 Emma Jane Haigh Costume Designer 1950s, Costume Design, human, Individuality, love, Office

As The Pin Hinge Collective, we knew we wanted to make a piece of theatre about what makes us human. What it is that ‘pins’ us together.
At this stage in time this was all we knew, but every process must have a beginning and this was ours.

After much artistic discussion, with a chorus of nine voices all with different ideas wanting to be heard, we came to the agreement that the show should include a plethora of human identities.

We asked the questions: What makes us human? What factors can influence who we are?

In response to our questions, we decided on four factors which can influence who we are as people.

Upbringing and Masculinity
Education
Disability
Relationships and Sexuality

After a lot of storyboarding and story-sharing, we created characters and narratives for each of our chosen factor.

We began by jotting ideas down for ‘Upbringing and Masculinity’. After hearing Dwain tell us a story from his childhood about a fishing trip with his dad, we were inspired to think about how traditional values of masculinity are imprinted in young boys from a very early age. We also spoke about how these traditionally masculine values are often passed along through the generations and can sculpt people into who they are.

After sharing an overwhelming amount of ideas and stories for each of the other human factors, we realised that we were trying to fit too much into a single fifty-minute show.

Back to the drawing board…

We have all experienced the feeling of love and that’s what all our ideas kept coming back to. Love.

With a completely new and inspiring idea, we each went away and thought about what the word ‘love’ meant to us. We brought back stories, scrapbooks and silly anecdotes to show our individual perceptions of love.

After being inspired by a story Emily told about her grandparents meeting and falling in love, we began to craft the opening of our show.

We wanted to create a physical movement office scene set in the 1950s showing a whirlwind romance between a typist and a handyman, eventually ending with the man leaving his wife for another woman.

As costume designer, I was immediately inspired by the 1950s setting. It’s an era which I have always been very interested in. I adore the hair, the clothes and the music!

I stared researching the typical office wear for women of the time. Pencil skirts were very popular for women to wear in the office, they showed off an hourglass figure and were often paired with cropped jackets.

I decided that the typist should stand out in the scene and after discussing her character with the group, we decided that she should wear something more fun to match her personality. A pencil skirt would be too severe for her character and too difficult to move in for the physical nature of the scene.

Circle skirts were also very fashionable in the 1950s. They were long circular skirts often worn with petticoats underneath. Poodle skirts were also very popular for young ladies of the era. They were a similar shape to circle skirts, but were embellished with cute little designs in shapes such as martini glasses and poodles. I felt that a skirt in one of these styles would be very suitable for the typist character. It would allow easy movement and suit her sweet youthful character. I would pair the skirt with a button up blouse, typical of the era, in either white or a pastel colour.

I researched how handymen would have looked in the 1950s, all the photos I found showed them in white or blue overalls. I decided that the handyman and the typist should be the only characters in the scene to have costumes which differ from the matching 1950s office wear which the rest of the cast would wear.

The ‘other woman’ is the only other character who would wear a stand-out costume. The handyman’s new woman would wear a very contrasting costume to the typist’s. Whilst the young typist would wear a youthful and innocent style, the new woman would wear a costume in a much sexier and mature style.

Wiggle dresses were very tight fitting, causing the woman to wiggle as she walked. The dress reached down to the calf in a typical 50s style. The new woman would wear lipstick in a sexy shade of red, demonstrating the contrast between her and the younger typist.