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 Sequins
and Silks
at
San Francisco Ballet
By Cheryl Ossola
It takes more than feathers to costume Swan Lake
In full-length classical ballets,
at times the dancing and story share nearly equal billing with
the sets and costumes—the visual elements are part of what
makes these romantic fantasies so powerful and enduring. When
the curtain rises to reveal the splendor onstage, it’s natural
for audiences to bask in it without question. But as anyone
who has ever been in charge of bringing a production to the
stage knows, what audiences take for granted is always the
result of some backstage sleight-of-hand. For an up-close look
at how a major professional ballet company works that kind of
magic with costuming, I went backstage at San Francisco Ballet
during preparations for Swan Lake.
Audiences that attend Swan Lake at San Francisco’s War
Memorial Opera House are treated to silks and chiffons,
velvets and brocades, feathers and sequins, leather boots and
character shoes. Though often the garments are built by
distant companies, the fittings and alterations, repairs and
reconstructions fall to the SFB wardrobe and costume staff.
Remounting a production—this one is 19 years old—means a long
process of assessing damages and making repairs—not to mention
refitting the clothing on dancers who often have very
different bodies than their predecessors. Getting the right
people outfitted in the right costume, on time and within
budget, is like completing a months-long jigsaw puzzle.
For Swan Lake, which opened in late January 2006, the
first piece of the puzzle fell into place during the previous
summer, when costume supervisor Patti Fitzpatrick went to the
company’s wardrobe warehouse to examine the costumes that
would be needed some six months later. There costumes that
cost approximately $6 million await their next venture under
the stage lights. Stored on shallow shelves are 150 tutus,
their skirts fanned out beneath folded-back bodices, along
with every other kind of costume imaginable. “I got [the
Swan Lake costumes] ready for us to start working on them
in September. It usually takes a couple of months of going
through each individual piece in order to do all of the
repairs,” says Fitzpatrick. General maintenance, such as
cleaning, reattaching loose baubles, and replacing faded
ribbons and droopy flowers, can start immediately, but actual
alterations can’t begin until casting has been announced.
Wardrobe supervisor George Elvin, who is responsible for the
men’s costumes, budget, and day-to-day operations, has 29
years of e xperience
with SFB; Fitzpatrick, who handles the huge number of women’s
costumes
and purchases
materials, has been on staff for 22 years. Both are backstage
during every show, assisting the dressers and troubleshooting.
Their expertise allows them to make educated guesses about
casting, and they can begin to anticipate what changes they’ll
need to make. “I had to guess whether we’d need new tutus for
the principal women [for Swan Lake], and I decided
yes,” says Fitzpatrick, who cites the condition of the tutus
and the body types of the dancers as factors in that decision.
“The last time I saw Tina [LeBlanc] in her tutu it was very
sad—it had started to collapse and fall.” Even though she
wasn’t sure whether LeBlanc would dance Odette/Odile again
(she did), Fitzpatrick began building a new tutu for her.
Large new productions are jobbed out to full-scale costume
shops, like Barbara Matera Ltd. in New York City, but repairs
to existing ballets are done in-house. And Fitzpatrick, along
with costumer/dresser/wardrobe assistant Nancy Endy, builds
smaller shows, like The Four Temperaments and
Prodigal Son, in their entirety.
One afternoon Endy was hard at work on a swan tutu bodice.
You’d think those fluffy-looking tutus would be covered with
feathers, but there are surprisingly few. “They have feathers,
but the design is done with horsehair and glue,” explains
Fitzpatrick. “The horsehair is sewn on in a serpentine pattern
and then frayed to make it three-dimensional. And then the
hot-glue design, with the glitter glue inside, replaces the
jewels that you would normally have. We’ve resequinned them to
bring out a little bit of sparkle. It’s not supposed to be fl
ashy, more like a subtle glow in the second act. I think our
Swan Lake is extraordinary, one of the most beautiful
I’ve seen.”
Casting decisions, which sometimes are not finalized until
several months before a production, present an ongoing problem
for the wardrobe department. Elvin had to anticipate whether
two new principal men that year, Davit Karapetyan and Tiit
Helimets, were going to be in Swan Lake. He didn’t find
out until the middle of December and the production opened at
the end of January—and the company was on break for the first
10 days of the month. At times like that, says Elvin, “we just
have to make do with what we have. Sometimes even if you have
money to spend, you haven’t got the time to spend it.”
Complicating matters further is the variable of body type.
Although physical characteristics are considered in casting,
dancers with different body types may cover the same role. “In
a full-length production,” says Fitzpatrick, “one t hing
that’s always last-minute
is that they put the students in, who we’re not familiar with
and who are in the process of growing. So you have to do
measurements on all of them. [In Swan Lake] all of the
women will be swans, and they can be very different sizes.
They can have a tiny little swan, 98 pounds, covering the role
of someone who’s 5' 6". This is where you tear your hair out,”
she laughs.
The biggest costuming challenge in Swan Lake is
footwear. The dancers’ pointe shoes and soft ballet shoes are
taken care of by the company’s resident shoe wrangler, but
character shoes for the women and boots for the men (for the
czardas and mazurka sections) fall into the category of
costumes. Unlike a tutu or a jacket, boots can’t be infinitely
adapted to a variety of wearers. And getting new ones doesn’t
happen overnight. “It takes time to get them made; they’re not
just something you buy from a store. They’re custom made, and
good people aren’t generally waiting around with nothing to
do,” says Elvin.
Because of the high cost of mounting a new production (a
full-length ballet’s costumes can easily cost $250,000, and
sometimes twice that), costumes are expected to have a long
life. For a tutu, which costs from $4,000 to $7,000, “you need
to get 10 years” of use, says Elvin. Although frequency of use
takes the biggest toll on costumes, fabrics do fade and
deteriorate over time.
Every time a ballet returns to the stage there are changes to
be made, especially when a long period has elapsed since its
last production. Along with a new crop of dancers comes the
challenge of adapting costumes to generational
differences—women have gotten taller and men more muscular,
which means tutu bodices must be extended and Spandex gussets
sewn into the men’s costumes to accommodate more developed
upper bodies. Fitzpatrick makes sure she has fabrics in the
colors of the costumes on hand (often dyed for an exact match)
so that she can make changes in fi t that don’t alter the
designer’s intent.
For most ballets, the number of principal costumes depends on
the number and body types of the original cast. If more than
one dancer can wear the same size costume, they share it. For
Swan Lake, there are four
or five each of the Odette and Odile tutus; although several
principal dancers typically share tutus, no one in recent
productions has worn the one made for the statuesque Muriel
Maffre in 1988.
Laundry is a fact of life downstairs at the Opera House, where
a supply of vodka is always at hand—for disinfecting costumes,
not for tippling. It’s s prayed
onto the garments, which
are then air dried, either in a hot-box drying room or, for more
delicate
pieces that would melt in high heat, in the dry,
fan-circulated air of the wardrobe department. By
union contract, costumes must be cleaned after every four
performances, but
sweat pads are changed and garments that are worn next to the
skin are washed after each use. “We
take the plates [decorative panels] off and wash the tutu—you
just stick it around the agitator, fill it up with water, let
it go a little bit on delicate,” Fitzpatrick says. “I’ve
washed tutus and laid them all over the lawn at my mom’s
house. I have pictures of them—it’s like 28 pancakes lying all
over the lawn on white sheets.”
Working with costumes means dealing with numbers, usually big
ones at a company like SFB. In Swan Lake there are 110
costumes, 29
costume changes, 10 dressers (plus Elvin and Fitzpatrick)
backstage during performances,
dozens of pairs of tights to launder after each performance,
and hundreds of hours of manpower to
make it all happen. And of course, an impossible-to-predict
number of problems to
resolve.
Problem solving is a way of life for the costume crew, even
when things are going
smoothly. When they go wrong, the teamwork and rapport that
the costumers have
developed with other backstage crew members can make the
difference
between a headache and a
glitchless show. For example, if a costume problem arises that
requires a quick fix between scenes, one of the stage managers
will notify the wardrobe department about the type of problem
and what’s needed to fix it. “Wardrobe to stage right with
needle and thread” coming in over the headset will send
Fitzpatrick (who spends most of her time during performances
downstairs in the costume shop and dressing rooms) scurrying
to the stage. Rarely do costume problems become noticeable to
audiences, but if they do, Elvin and Fitzpatrick come up with
a solution quickly.
Costuming is an irreplaceable part of the theatricality of
ballet, and Fitzpatrick speaks for many dancegoers when she
says, “I love the way the fabrics drape the bodies, the colors
and the jewels, the men in doublets. Especially in the story
ballets, costuming often fills the stage. There’s so much
magic in it.”
Photo captions (from top to bottom):
As Odette, SFB principal dancer Lorena Feijoo (here with Davit
Karpetyan) wears a tutu that looks fluffy but has few feathers
on it.
Colorful dresses worn by SFB dancers(left to right) Erin
McNulty, Brooke Taylor Moore, and Pauli Magierek in Swan Lake
boost the scene’s visual impact.
Gold embellishes the Black Swan costumes worn by Lorena Feijoo
(Odile) and Davit Karapetyan (Siegfried) in Swan Lake.
Details add interest to costumes in similar colors worn by SFB
dancers (left to right) Frances Chung, Joseph Phillips, and
Rachel Viselli in Swan Lake.
All photos by Erik Tomasson, courtesy San Francisco Ballet
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