Costume Design Lesson 1

What is costume?

Costume is an outfit worn when you are performing.

Why do we have costume?

Costume is used to aid the actor to help them separate themselves from their character and help them to give an overall better performance. It also helps the audience understand the story more clearly.

Why is it relevant?

Costume is relevant because it helps create the atmosphere of the play.Bright coloured clothes are appropriate for children's theatre but may not be for a show such as Once or Blood Brothers. It shows what historical era the play is set in and is representational or your character.

What does it communicate about your character?

Costume can represent your character's personality, social class and species. For instance if you wear a costume with loud prints and colours on it could communicate that your character has a big, outgoing personality. If you are portraying an animal you would want a costume to communicate this, such as bunny ears or a tail.

In this lesson we were put into three different groups and then given a piece of costume. We then had a couple of minutes to come up with a short scene including the costume.

I worked with Elsie, Lauren, John and Cherkanah. The first piece of costume we were given was some rubber gloves. 

We all immediately had the same idea of a mum washing up whilst her children played up. Cherkanah used the gloves and took on the role of an overworked mum trying to do too many things at once. Lauren and I were two young children at the table demanding their dinner whilst Elsie and John were the older children who refused to help and argued with their mum. It was a simple idea but I think it worked well. 

We then did the same thing with a Christmas hat. This time Lauren used the costume and acted as someone over enthusiastic about Christmas when she opened the door to some carollers.  The last costume was a 1950s style skirt which I used as we pretended to be at a 1950s dance doing the hand jive. 

                                

This exercise taught me how even the smallest piece of costumes give connotations and can affect a whole play. All of our ideas stemmed from the costumes and this shows how important they are to any performance.