One of the unique things that we do here at the Fort Wayne Dance Collective, is create all of our own costumes for our performances. Yes, you read correctly, CREATE, as in each year we recruit parents of students, volunteers, committee members, and whoever else we can find to: cut out patterns, pin fabric, hand sew, etc. each and every costume for our two productions which include all of our on-site students, as well as our guests from various outreach sites such as: Memorial Park Middle School and Bi-County Services just to name a few.
In this year’s June Family Concert: The Lost Balloon, we will have 172 performers. I’m pretty sure that is a record! So, when Garrett High School student, Naomi Groves, emailed me with the following questions, I was a bit surprised. It really made me realize just how special this unique tradition is, and caused me to reflect on why we do it this way.
Dear Fort Wayne Dance Collective,
I currently attend at Garrett High School and my English 11 class is doing a research project. I chose to do mine on fashion dance design. I was wondering if I can do an interview through email or I can come in? Please let me know if its okay to do this.
Garrett High School Student,
Naomi
Questions:
1. As an instructor, how do you determined what costume design to use for the dance piece?
2. Do you mostly base it with the music? or Do you base it with the choreography? (Costume design)
3. Who do you order the costumes from?
4. How does that ordering process work?
Naomi,
It is so interesting that you chose the Fort Wayne Dance Collective as a source for your report as we do costumes very differently from other dance studios. When we started our school in 1979 we decided that we wanted to make sure that dance classes were assessable to anyone. This meant not charging people to buy expensive dance costumes that they would wear one time and not making students who had different body types uncomfortable wearing the typical dance costume. Plus we just really didn’t like the kind of dance attire you see in dance costume catalogs…it just isn’t who we were or are.
So, early on we just started making them. We were able to purchase 600 yards of parachute nylon for dirt-cheap and we made so many things out of that as it was light and flowed nicely and we could dye it different colors. Plus it wasn’t too hard to sew. We started asking for fabric donations…lots of sewers had left over fabric, or something they were not going to use, so we started acquiring a good stash of supply. Plus each year we’d make something new and our costume racks started multiplying. We’d reuse things each year and no one seemed to mind. The five year old we would hand a white skirt and bandana for their hair were always thrilled. One year the dance clothing store Standing Ovation Performance Apparel (formerly K Ellen Dance Apparel) were going through their inventory and donated about 100 leotards and tights! So, if you came to our space in the basement, you’ll find rows of bins labeled “white fabric, blue fabric etc” and “hats, gloves, animal tails,” and so on.
Costume design….for abstract pieces we start with a color. Our concerts are themed so the Halloween concert has a lot of dark colors and the December concert a lot of green and red. We keep things simple for the most part. I listen to what the choreographer wants, we go to the basement and see what we have and if they need something more we provide it. For our June concert, we write a story and all of the different classes are a part of the story. So, for this year we had a birthday party scene and we had some red tutus from a previous year and we added some crowns we had. The girls will wear their own funky tights and there is the costume. We had tiger pull-over’s from a previous year but needed to make head pieces, so I went online for an image of the tiger to see the shape of the ears and we’re currently making headpieces. The beauty of doing it this way is that everyone gets involved. Parents know when they bring their child to class that they will be doing something to contribute to the show and they have ownership… “I made those tiger headpieces.” It’s a lot of fun! We hear comments all the time “we love not having to pay for costumes!”
People also bring in things from their closets. We’ll say “next week bring in what you have that is red and purple,” then we’ll lay them all out on the floor, mix and match and create from there. Salvation Army and Goodwill are also our friends and a great cheap way to create costumes…
Well, this was fun to write. Let me know if you need anything more…
Liz