So out of curiosity, wolf anyone be interested in like. A podcast about Tech theatre? Kind of like this post I made forever ago that blew up
[IMAGE ID: tumblr user 5-to-places: You know what I want? I want a show in the Style of The Office, only it follows a production team at a theatre. Have like, an SM, some designers, front of house, an electrician, board ops, a Michael Scott-esque director who has all these big ideas, and actors that would cycle through every half season or at the end of the season. Idk just an idea. END IMAGE ID]
I’m kinda thinking of making it, but in an audio format, maybe framing it in the way of a Stage Manager who records production meetings, mixed in with phone calls and things like that.
This is what I’m thinking:
[IMAGE ID: Discord user Kestrel (They/He): So what I’m thinking is a podcast that follows a Tech crew at a theatre company, and I want it to have sort of SF (Stellar Firma) vibes but it’ll be scripted. It’d mostly focus on tech crew, but there will obviously be a director, a few actors, etc. And the director has sort of Michael Scott vibes in the way of big ideas and no realistic way to achieve them, And the actors of varying degrees of coolness ranging from ‘neat actor who helps out sometimes and generally gets along with tech’ to Actor™️ (trademark emoji).
In terms of Tech characters I for sure want a design team (Scenic, Costume, Lighting, and Sound), a Props Master bc of course, a Tech Director, and maybe some scenic carpenters, stitches, and electricians. And a Stage Manager. END IMAGE ID]
I’m not gonna say its definitely gonna be a thing, but I would love to do it if there’s an interest in it, so like. Let me know in the replies/reblogs!
What is the Jungian Shadow, anyway, and why is it relevant? Here is a short new video of Shadow Tender’s artistic director, Natasha Kolosowsky, explaining & contextualizing these things + some art and dancing.
In brief, it’s a performance and workshop series that asks how humans create and interact with the monstrous within ourselves and in others, and seeks to provide the tools and inspiration to meet our shadows with compassion rather than fear, shame, or rejection. We’re examining these ideas through the lens of fantasy, theater, wearable sculpture, and movement, with inspiration ranging from neuroscience to alchemical philosophy. We’ve been invited to perform and teach at the World Stage Design festival this July in Taiwan, Taipei - one of the largest international performance design festivals in the world! But we’ll need your help to get there! We’re only about 26% of the way to our funding goal, and we only have a few days left of our crowdfunding campaign!
SHADOW TENDER IS ON THE POSTER for SCENOFEST - the performance program of the entire World Stage Design festival! The poster is up in Taiwan right now. Wha…?!! That’s Aurelia Cohen and Maria in the bottom image. What an honor….now we have to go!
Speaking of which, we are just past 25% of our total goal for funding with LESS THAN a week to go in our campaign. If we are able to get to get to at least 45% of the full sum, that may be enough to get us to the festival.
We have been blown away by the generosity of our communities thus far — thank you SO MUCH for supporting us and believing in Shadow Tender. I cannot begin to express how much it means to be able to share these ideas with you and to hear affirmation that yes, this work is necessary, timely, and welcome in the world.
Can we do it? Can we actually make it to Taiwan?! As we near the final, deciding week of our Indiegogo campaign, we are working extra hard to reach out far and wide to encourage people to donate and make Shadow Tender a reality. Our whole team is giving it absolutely everything we can, but we still have a ways to go.
Will you help us spread the word in the coming week? Its as simple as sending a short note or sharing the campaign linkwith somebody you think may resonate with our work – every little bit counts.
….After all, we are already on the poster : )
Thank you for being part of this adventure with us!
Mask prototypes for the Shadow Tender project, directed by Natalya Kolosowsky. Shadow Tender looks at the psychological mechanisms of demonization at the root of extreme nationalistic policy and personal fears through the medium of theater, wearable sculpture, and movement.
Our masks and costumes seek to externalize our inner anxieties, doubts, and struggles–we can move in them, face them when worn by another, and hopefully, find healthy ways to reintegrate with them, free of both wallowing or blind rejection.
If you build it they will come! We are building the multi level costume racks in our new Costume Shop. 12’ tall by 34’ wide using 1.5” schedule 40 steel pipe and 90* couplers. We bolted the flanges into the cinder block and added liquid nail today. We should be able to finish on Monday and have at least 77’ of costume hanging space with room to expand for future growth.
Here’s a little sneak peek into the developing costume designs for or lead characters in the PURE pilot episode, created by our amazing costume designer, Kumie Asai!
We’ll continue posting about our pre-production journey on social media and at www.journeytotheannex.com. More to come!
Me: But Hamilton is an opera and I know you like that.
Them:
Me:
Them:Wait what
Them: No I mean operatic singing opera. Not a musical in which the entire production is sung opera.
Me:Oh okay that’s different then. Why?
Them: Because I can’t understand any of it.
Me: Are you under the impression that you’re supposed to understand opera?
Them:Then why do you watch it?
Me: It’s like extreme sports you can vibe to.
Them:…
Them:What?
Them: There’s no way that opera can be that impressive or difficult.
Me:
Them: Holy sh*t
Opera is super physical!
I’ve yet to have the fortune of costuming one, but one thing I learned in school is opera requires lots of special design/construction considerations. You need to accommodate the movement of extremely large, flexible, and powerful chests!
I’ve heard stories about ladies busting the seams of steel boned corsets with the sheer force of their expanding lungs.
HEY! If you want to support communities of colour and are a sewer, cosplayer, quilter, knitter or DIY lover, then I have fantastic news! I just found an amazing master list of businesses owned by POC, women, and allies that sell sewing and crafting supplies. It’s got a full breakdown of what they carry, who runs it, where they’re based, etc.
This list is the baby of Seattle-based designer Jacinta Green. The sellers are all vetted by Jacinda or by followers she trusts. It’s already at 236 and is still growing! You can find her on instagram @pinkmimosabyjacinta.
Joey Batey is really approximately the same size and shape as Henry Cavill, and there are a number of clever techniques in pretty much all Jaskier’s costumes to hide this fact and make him look about three or four inches narrower than he actually is. The costumers work really really hard to make him look that twinky, often with cleverly cut shoulder decorations that pretend he’s trying to look bigger than he is and have the actual effect of making him look a lot lighter.
On a Doylistic level this makes sense, because it’s hard to make Geralt look Huge and Imposing next to your non-combatant harmless sidekick if said sidekick is a jacked six foot burly man.
On a Watsonian level, however, the notion of Jaskier as this big meaty dude aggressively arguing with all his tailors to ensure that he looks as non threatening and foppish and entertaining as possible while also looking as sexy as he can (for a Jaskier definition of sexy, at least) is generating considerable entertainment for me this fine morning.
“No! My shoulders must look slender!”
“But, sir, you could look ripped!”
“Absolutely not! I must look slim and gentle and unassuming!”
“As you wish, sir… So do you wish it to be cut with much excess fabric, so that you look small and also very wealthy to afford so much?”
[howling] “No! I must look slender and gentle and also above else very attractive!”
Geralt doesn’t notice any of this until they try to share a tiny hostel bed on the road and Jaskier cuddles up to him and abruptly there is no more room in that bed
I need a full picture costume run down of this by someone in the fashion field stat
Ask and ye shall receive! I may not work in the fashion field but I do work in the costume production industry for theatre/film so this is totally my area. Using clothes to change someone’s appearance is super common, and Tim Aslam’s costume design for The Witcher is actually a really good example of this, so buckle up because this is a long ride!
Creating an illusion like this has two main components:shape(the style lines created by the clothes), and fit (the way the clothes hang on the person’s body), and is the result of close collaboration between the designer and the production team.
We’re going to talk about season one, because that’s where the difference is the most obvious. Take a look at Geralt:
First, let’s talk about shape. The goal here is to make Geralt look strong and imposing, and the best way to do that is to exaggerate the triangle of his upper torso. See how much broader his shoulders look than his waist in both images? A loose shirt over tight pants is a classic way to establish this, because the shirt blousing at the waist (note that the pants sit high up at the natural waist) makes the hips looks narrower in comparison. Note also that his shirt has an asymmetrical closure - a centered vertical line down the shirt would make him looks slimmer, while the off-center one adds width.
His armor does this by giving him those massive shoulder pieces, which both lengthen and raise his shoulder line. I would estimate that they raise Henry Cavill’s shoulder line by a good two inches just from the bulk of the leather alone. His torso armor also does a really clever thing by having a very subtle V shape to the vertical lines, making his waist look smaller. If you count the number of stripes above and below his belt (again, sitting high at the natural waist), you’ll notice that the narrow stripe at the front edge of the armscye disappears, which allows the side stripes to make that V shape.
Now let’s talk about fit. The fit of Geralt’s shirt looks simple but is actually super specific. It’s very easy for an actor to get lost in a shirt that is too loose - if there’s too much extra fabric then it will just make the actor look smaller by drawing attention to how baggy it is. This shirt fits just right: the sleeves are full enough to allow for movement but still relatively fitted (and rolling up the sleeves actually also helps add breadth to Geralt’s torso by continuing the horizontal line at his waist). The body of the shirt fits smoothly across the shoulders and chest, and has just enough fullness to drape at the waist without feeling baggy.
Now let’s look at Jaskier.
We’ll start with this look. Shape and fit are very interconnected here so it’s just gonna be a jumble. First thing I notice: the jacket. Unlike your traditional fantasy/historical doublet, all of Jaskier’s jackets end at the waist, rather than continuing into a peplum/skirt like Geralt’s armor does. This cropped jacket is evocative of childhood/immaturity, an association that is generally considered to have its roots in schoolboy uniforms of the 19th and early 20th century (see the image of schoolboys wearing “Eton Jackets” below)
Jaskier also tends to wear his jackets open. This creates a vertical line down his torso, which is generally slimming, but it also totally obscures the shape of his torso. The brain is going to take the line of his hip, which we can see, and the armscye of his jacket, (which actually looks to be cut ever so slightly artificially narrow but it’s hard to tell) and fill in a line between them, which is likely going to end up being slightly narrower than his actual ribcage. He does have poofs at the top of his sleeves, which can be a technique used to add width, but if they’re cut and fit carefully you can actually hide some of the breadth of the shoulders inside the poof and make it look like the fullness comes from the poof and not the body.
Note: the “armscye” is the technical name for the armhole, but specifically the torso part. The corresponding sleeve part is the “sleevehead.”
Again, we have another open jacket, this one with strong vertical lines. See how the line of Jaskier’s hip flows up through the edge of the doublet all the way up through the armscye? This makes his torso look narrower despite the jacket’s shoulder tabs. In contrast, this line is always broken on Geralt’s outfits, whether at the waist with his shirt or with the giant shoulder pieces with his armor. Jaskier’s pants also tend to fit more loosely, which de-emphasizes the triangle of his shoulders to waist.
Okay this is my favorite image to illustrate everything we have going on here. Look at Jaskier’s jacket. What’s the first thing you notice? The bright yellow inset slashes in his chest. The high contrast in color draws the eye inwards and distracts from the breadth of his shoulders, where we have another cleverly cut poof. His jacket is again cropped, with strong vertical lines, over the baggiest pants he wears in the season.
Now look at Jaskier and Geralt together. Jaskier is all about long vertical lines, while Geralt’s predominate lines are either horizontal or diagonal. Additionally, Jaskier’s hips look even to his shoulders, even if they’re not, and Geralt’s shoulders are exaggerated. The two characters have a very different presence, even if the actors underneath are similar.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to costume design! Creating the illusory effects like this is one of my favorite things and I am excited to share!!
…ok I love this but … why didn’t they just hire a real twink?
They hired Joey Batey because he showed up to the audition with an actual lute upon which he played and sang a song he’d written the night before called “The Lion Cub of Cintra” based entirely on the role he was auditioning for. Batey happens to be basically built as a fairly meaty guy, one of those people who seems to put on both muscle and fat fairly effectively, although judging from his music he is often worried about being seen as fat. He is not a small man and will never be a small man, but he isvery committed to the role, a musician in his own right when he’s not playing Jaskier, and generally plays the role fairly well. Personally I am glad we went with “musical talent” as a higher priority in our casting than waifish slimness.
one thing the tags have been quietly driving me nuts about on this discussion is also… look okay, my original shitposting from last year? is very much based on the belief that the body you’re born with does not define who you choose to be. Jaskier’s costuming choices are most interesting to me as a conscious choice for several reasons, and I’m gonna rant for a sec because look I had a point there I wanted to jokingly but very seriously talk about and the costuming shit is all very well and good but I wanted to talk about what it means for the character to choose to dress and present himself this way. what does it mean in story fucking terms to have a big buff dude that presents himself as non-combatant, as vulnerable, as gossipy and a little swish but not a physical threat?
see, masculinity is often defined negatively, as “whatever isn’t feminine”, and the constructed artifice of deliberate appearance modification is pretty clearly coded feminine in mainstream Anglo culture (which is what I have access to, gender is complicated, but I’m going off here). what this means is that visibly trying to control your appearance and the way that people perceive you is something that is often assumed to undermine masculinity, which has all kinds of super special social drawbacks for men/AMAB folks who don’t perform masculinity well because misogyny+sexism+transmisogyny do fun things together.
you’re allowed to control your appearance if you pretend that the reason you’re doing so is totally divorced from the way you look (I’m lifting weights to be strong/lifting weights because I want to be hot) and the artifice you use to execute the effects is completely invisible to the viewer (not wearing any kind of visible makeup, for example). so just from that perspective, the fact that Jaskier dresses consistently to make himself seem a certain way is interesting to me. his gender presentation is a deliberate choice, and it is a deliberate choice that erodeshis social status in masculine posturing rather than shores it up.
the fact that Jaskier’s size also makes him a potential threat to other people and that he acts to minimize that is also interesting in the context of the way he earns his income. it’s heavily implied that he probably secures some of his patronage through a form of sex work (i.e. his patron the Contessa, who is both paying him and sleeping with him, which ends when she throws him out of the sexual relationship). moreover, he’s an entertainer, and being muscular and large isn’t very helpful when you earn your living via your fine motor skills: damaging your hands is potentially devastating if you earn your bread playing a lute, and getting into fights is therefore dangerous for his livelihood. threatening entertainers don’t relax people into parting with money and food and shelter.
we think of being threatening as an asset in all circumstances but that is fundamentally not the case. a large, hulking, threatening Geralt will incur a certain amount of posturing from dudes who want to feel big and scary and important in their home communities; Jaskier is likely to get ignored by coming across as meek and fairly non threatening. it’s a deliberate strategy, and we knowit’s deliberate because he has the bulk and body size to present himself the way Geralt does if he wants. so he doesn’t want to do that, he must wantto be perceived as expressive and a little swish and not dangerous at all and approachable, and he has clearly worked hard enough to get that across that it fooled a really ridiculously high fraction of the folks in my notes here.
this post has been really resonating with delighted surprised trans folks among other things and hey! I see y’all! you are still whatever gender you feel most comfortable in even if your body isn’t cooperating right now. you can choose a lotof the way you will be perceived by thinking about your clothing, your movement, and your postures, and you can learn to do all those things with practice and thought.
and I just think it’s neat seeing a character who easily has the body type to do a very normative gender thing choose to do a non-conforming thing in a way that you absolutely do not see much in media, because usually they fucking hire the twink instead of doing all that work to get the right gender presentation, and the story fucking suffers for it and people who aren’t naturally skinny waifs don’t get to see nice things that look like them in the show.
so.
that’s why.
I already reblogged this for the fascinating costume design, but adding this because it’s important.
It got better. Thoughtful gender presentation is my JAM.
Okay this this entire post is solid gold. The costume analysis is so spot on! And the added discussion about gender presentation and dressing trans figures is just! *chef’s kiss*
Thinking a lot about mental health in relation to my career and work-life balance lately.
Dealing with ongoing mental health issues like ADHD and depression can be a very uneven experience.
Sometimes you’re doing great, taking your meds, having what I like to call “good brain days”. And these might last a while! Long enough that you start to feel like you have a handle on things, even like you might be in something resembling remission.
Then you go downhill. Often you’re still taking your meds, still practicing the healthier coping mechanisms you’ve learned, all of it. Despite that, you’re really struggling again. You remember that no, this isn’t something you can be cured of. There is no silver bullet, and this struggle will continue to be a large portion of your life.
I’ve mostly accepted that, but it can be hard when a long good period is what’s been allowing you to get up and go to work like every one else. When that period comes to an end, what do I do? Am I ever going to be able to maintain a 40 hour week for more than a few months before I burn out?
The pandemic has really opened my eyes to this, because I’ve been working costuming jobs mostly from home, which requires me to keep close track of my hours. I’m realizing that left to my own devices, I struggle to put in more than 30 hours a week. Sometimes I can’t even make 20. And the ADHD can make it very hard to work as efficiently as another seamstress would.
I think actually working around other people again might help with that, but my career goal is costume designer, to which independance & time management is crucial. And in the meantime, the average wardrobe stitching job is often a lot more than 40h/week. How can I ever hope to make a good life for myself when I can only handle part-time hours?
I guess I just hope that it will become easier if I find a job I actually like that pays a living wage? But there’s no guarantee for any of it.
