A Marie Cordella creation from the 2007 fashionSPARK show. (Photo by Jeremy M. Lange)
Traditionally, participating in a school fashion show has proved to be a great way to launch one’s career. In 1995, Stella McCartney inaugurated her first line while attending England’s celebrated Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. And when another of that school’s students unveiled his work, the eccentric socialite Isabella Blow bought each piece of the graduation collection. The student’s name? The great-and now late-visionary Alexander McQueen.
Among these parts, Art to Wear is no exception in that regard. Previous designers have gone on to such varied fields as graduate school, arts management and design for companies large and small.
Orvokki Halme was part of the event’s inaugural class in 2002, and is now in graduate school at Carnegie-Mellon University pursuing a master’s degree in arts management.
“It gave a venue, for those of us who were creating apparel at the time, to show our work that seemed more fitting than a pin-up or a gallery setting,” Halme said. He notes that fashion design seemed to be a new trend in student interest in the art and design degree. After finishing his undergraduate studies, he worked in fashion briefly and was involved with runway shows and New York Fashion Week.
Another designer who got started at Art to Wear is Ryan Wayne, who designed for the show for three years and served as co-director in 2006.
“Directing was great and is an experience even most of the graduates from the major fashion schools from all over the world get to do,” Wayne said. She said she still gets looks of amazement when she talks about ATW and the caliber of its importance. After stints designing in London and forecasting fashion trends in New York, Wayne now attends in graduate school in England, studying textile design at Chelsea College of Art and Design.
Other Art to Wear alums have made a splash here at home.
Liz Morrison designed for four years starting in 2005, and directed in 2008. She now works as a costume designer in Chapel Hill for Deep Dish Theater, citing Art to Wear for teaching her the ins and outs of nonprofit event management for the performing arts along with designing. Morrison has also been instrumental in compiling the annual event’s extensive archive, housed in the Harrye B. Lyons Design Library in Brooks Hall.
“First and foremost, I learned the importance of time management. It is imperative to keep a well-organized schedule when planning an event, particularly at this scale,” Morrison said, citing both her experiences as designer and director as learning experiences.
Designer Marie Cordella, who showed at Art to Wear in 2006, has been a fixture at SPARKcon since the festival’s inception in 2006. She and about seven others ignited the first fashionSPARK, and she’s been a featured designer each year since then. The show has become a celebrated mix of a few better-known local designers and a collection of newer, fresh designers with new work and ideas to strut down the runway.
“Art to Wear is a relevant experience in relation to fashionSPARK because of its similarity in nature,” Cordella said, mentioning the parallel processes from applying to participate to eventually showing off that time-intensive hard work in a public space.
Morrison really enjoyed her Art to Wear experience, especially in directing.
“[Through Art to Wear] I found out about the incredible power of artistic collaboration. It is really amazing what a group of motivated, creative individuals can accomplish,” Morrison said.
Morrison will be present for next month’s show, and she surely won’t be the only member of a growing list of alumni in attendance.
CAROLINA THEATRE/ DURHAM—Ask any high-school theater geek, and they’ll have heard of Gilbert and Sullivan. Ask me, I was one. But amazingly, I graduated high school and went all through college without once seeing one of their plays or hearing any of the songs.
All of that changed when I attended a rehearsal for The Mikado, performed by the Durham Savoyards. Founded in 1963, the troupe is dedicated to performing solely Gilbert and Sullivan standards. While they rotate through a number of titles, they return to the more popular ones more frequently.
This outing marks director Derrick Ivey’s second time helming the opera. His first time directing for the Savoyards occurred in 2003, when he directed a different version of The Mikado.
“The one we did in 2003 was a really radical re-visioning. It was a modern setting, and we had a huge back story,” Ivey says, noting that the text and music remained unchanged. The modern characters then stepped into the Japanese story after the choreographed overture, creating a layered story-within-a-story effect. That production was the last time the Savoyards performed the opera.
Though the Savoyards only have one large performance each year, they make sure to do it in style. Sarah Nevill, one of the show’s producers, says that the group has sold more tickets than at this point last year. As far as Nevill knows, no other group like the Savoyards exists in North Carolina.
A technical rehearsal was underway during my visit; as I walked through the Carolina Theatre’s backstage corridors, cast and crew bustled about, absorbed in their preparations. A peek into the makeup rooms revealed actors getting their faces brushed with white paste to simulate Japanese Kabuki-style makeup. Actors padded around the halls in dressing gowns, with hair held in caps to aid in wearing wigs later. Orchestra members tuned up in the pit the cast’s first full-dress rehearsal (involving not only costumes, but also make-up and wigs). Continue reading »
From the 2008 Art to Wear show: Jessica Monique George models a kente-inspired wrap made from her own woven and dyed fabric. (Photo by Jeremy M. Lange)
As veteran broadcaster Ron Burgundy of Anchorman might say, North Carolina State University’s Art to Wear fashion show is kind of a big deal.
People know it and mark their calendars for what’s become known as a reliable showcase of talent. The annual fashion show, put on by the College of Design (COD) and College of Textiles (COT), has made quite a mark in the burgeoning Raleigh fashion scene.
“People [tend to] stake out their seats hours beforehand,” says Vita Plume, COD art and design teacher and Art to Wear faculty advisor. Plume was the sole advisor until COT joined the event in 2006, and Dr. Cynthia Istook, associate professor of textile and apparel management, has served in the same capacity for COT since that time.
In 2002, Plume taught a fibers studio in which many students were working with garments. One student, Kate Crawford, presented a new collection for every critical evaluation, which gave Plume the idea to put on a fashion show. Crawford eventually became the event’s first director.
“If they hadn’t been making clothing, I wouldn’t have thought of it,” Plume says.
Two hundred and fifty people came out to witness the inaugural event, which was held in Kamphoefner lower courtyard (known as “The Pit”) near the Design School, with six designers showing their semester’s work.
“People heard the music, and they were hanging off [the railings],” Plume says. The second and third years saw audience members crammed in to the venue, and organizers introduced video projection screens to showcase the designs to more people.
As word of mouth spread about N.C. State’s unique fashion event, the show’s audience grew. By 2005, the show was big enough to warrant a permanent name. Art to Wear had arrived.
After five years, organizers realized they needed a bigger venue. Designers showed collections in the Court of North Carolina on the university’s East Campus in 2007 and 2008 (audience members either paid for seats or lounged in the grass for free), before moving indoors to Reynolds Coliseum last year. The number of attendees peaked in 2008, with an estimated 2,700 on hand. (Last year’s count dipped slightly, with the show attracting 2,500 attendees.)
Naturally, with that growth, the show’s budget has ballooned. In a meeting with committee heads and designers on Feb. 22, this year’s event director Eleanor Hoffman put that number as pushing $30,000. That’s a far cry from the event’s inaugural year, where each student ponied up $25 and relied on friends and family for assistance with set-up-for example, founding co-director Brannan Hackney’s dad DJ’ed and the participating designers used their own money for votive candles to decorate the runway. This year, each designer is responsible for raising at least $100 to help with costs, which include components such as still photographs, videography, and hair and make-up sponsored by local salons.
The event has also attracted established figures in the Raleigh arts community to be judges. One name especially jumps out: William Ivey Long, famed Broadway costume designer and North Carolina native who’s won five Tony Awards. In 2008, Long was a member of the three-juror panel (not unlike the judging triumvirate on Project Runway), that decides which designers get to show their collections. (That year, 17 out of 31 hopefuls made it in.) This year, Long is donating a cash prize to be awarded in a fashion that has yet to be determined.
This year’s show takes place on April 14 in N.C. State’s Reynolds Coliseum. Until then, I’ll be covering various aspects of putting on the show and creating collections with weekly installments on the process. Visit the Web site here.
DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER/DURHAM—There’s no musical juggernaut like The Phantom of the Opera: The touring version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s great show has been on the road for 17 years. Its upcoming month-long stand at Durham Performing Arts Center represents the fulfillment of one of the facility’s objectives, and DPAC officials are betting that they’ll be able to fill seats for the 32 performances that begin on Thanksgiving Day.
Although the show doesn’t open for another week, the huge work of loading it in began this morning. The famous decorative elements of ThePhantom of the Opera-the chandelier, the underground tunnels and everything else-will fit easily onto DPAC’s massive stage and will no doubt thrill audiences. But behind the opulence is a lot of grunt work that goes into laying the foundation for the complex, notoriously mobile set.
This morning at DPAC, the load-in began-a full week before the show’s opening (it’s still running in Tempe, Ariz., with the actors using a second set). There are about 75 people working under the direction of David Hansen, advance stage manager.
When we enter the facility, we are greeted-awed, even-by the proscenium arch that jutted at a forward angle toward the audience seats. The structure is decorated with friezes depicting Pan-like creatures bearing maidens who are, in turn, surrounded by angels aloft. These figures successfully evoke the Neo-Baroque style of the Opera Garnier setting of Gaston Leroux’s 1911 novel. We watch as the workers expertly assemble this grand bit of scenic fakery with the aid of hydraulic lift.
Behind the proscenium lay a tangle of lights, cables and black-painted metallic structural supports. During performances, a stagehand will sit atop this structure to man the lights.
We then see the famous chandelier looming menacingly in a corner. It weighs nearly 1,000 lbs. and incorporates 35,000 crystal beads. For all its delicate gold filigree work, Hansen concedes, the chandelier doesn’t look that great up close-perhaps the result of crashing to the floor nearly 7,000 times. By opening night, 141 candles will have been built into the floor, and there will be footlights designed to resemble gaslights of the period.
The cast won’t have to worry about dancing on an unfamiliar stage at DPAC. “The dancers have the same surface in every city to dance on,” Hansen said. Indeed, the DPAC stage is covered with stacks of floor panels labeled “Phantom III Advance,” with the direction “upstage” marked on the side. We watch as eight to 10 stagehands maneuver each panel, weighing between 80 and 120 lbs., by using a pulley system suspended on a chain hung from the ceiling. Another stagehand wields a T-shaped instrument to push two panels together. Other hands help by pushing their sneaker-clad feet against one panel. Hansen tells us a track is built into the panels to ensure quick fastening and subsequent removal.
Hansen says that it took the show’s designers eight months to prepare such an elaborate, yet portable set. Preproduction costs ran close to $11 million (in 1992 dollars), with $3 million of it devoted to costumes.
The tour travels with 20 48-foot trailers, and nine were unloaded this week. Since the production sends out trucks to the next tour stop while the present one is running, the total number of trucks used is around 30.
Hansen said the advance time is necessary for troubleshooting any problems that may arise. Here in Durham, he’ll check dressing rooms and sinks to ensure that they are in compliance with expectations, do paperwork and establish telephone contact with the venue in Ft. Lauderdale, the next stop on the tour.
The Phantom of the Opera will end its Durham run on a Sunday and open in Fort Lauderdale the following Wednesday. By then, Hansen and company will go to work all over again, laying the groundwork for the Phantom’s next stop, Orlando.
As audience members file into the theater to see this touring production of South Pacific, they see a huge screen hanging in front of the stage. It’s covered with phrases that refer to the “Japs” and the human heads available as souvenirs. Striking a note of defiantly old-fashioned terror, this prop effectively sets the scene for audience, and reminds us that the original production, produced in 1949, came as America was still recovering from the trauma of World War II.
This South Pacific is the touring production of Bartlett Sher’s acclaimed 2008 Broadway revival, with a new cast. Despite the unsettling opening tableau, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s musical, and the 1958 movie, have long been in the zone of comfort food. For those who need a refresher, however, we’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean while World War II rages offstage. On an island, U.S. Navy ensign Nellie Forbush, a sweet but unworldly girl from Arkansas, meets the much older plantation owner Emile de Becque. They fall in love, but Nellie freaks when boy introduces her to his mixed-race children.
As Emile, David Pittsinger strikes the right note as a man running from the past. His baritone voice fills the house, especially during the mournful song “This Nearly Was Mine.” Carmen Cusack plays Nellie as a wide-eyed naïf whose enthusiasm belies some deep-seated prejudices, complete with an Arkansas accent that wouldn’t be completely out of place in the Triangle.
As the show’s second set of lovers, in the show’s spy mission subplot, Anderson Davis imbues Lt. Joseph Cable with a sense of patriotic duty, while Sumie Maeda plays Liat with a touching vulnerability. Both couples show believable chemistry, with Pittsinger and Cusack’s being deeper yet slightly hesitant, and Davis and Maeda’s being sweetly innocent.
Elsewhere in the cast, Matthew Saldivar provides comic relief as Luther Billis, portraying him as a hapless would-be entrepreneur, and Gerry Becker plays Capt. George Brackett with blustering authority. Filling out the show is an able and non-obtrusive chorus.
With the peppy tunes and engaging dance numbers, this cast makes this journey to the South Pacific a pleasant one that does no harm to the canonical status of the show.
DURHAM—At 8:30 Saturday night, Oct. 24, Michael Jackson fans gathered at The Pavilion at Durham Central Park for a tribute to the late entertainer calledThrill the World. It was a part of a worldwide event meant to synchronize participants at 12:30 a.m. UTC/GMT doing a dance similar to the one in Jackson’s “Thriller” music video.
The first“Thriller” dance took place in Toronto in 2006, in an affair that drew 62 people and set the Guinness Book of World Records’ “record” for most “Thriller” dancers in one place and time. By last year, the event had gone global and attracted more than 4,000 did the (nearly) inimitable dance.
Approximately 40 people turned out to the Durham gig, which was planned and executed locally within a span of two weeks.
Footage taken by Belem Destefani. Video produced by Belem Destefani and Sarah Ewald.
Footage of the 2009 American Dance Festival program Past/Forward with performances of Faye Driscoll’s There’s So Much Mad in Me and Laura Dean’s Infinity, as reconstructed by Rodger Belman. The piece Various Stages of Drowning: A Cabaret by Rosie Herrera is not shown here, but will also be performed.
The footage you see here is of Beloved Renegade, as rehearsed by the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the 2009 American Dance Festival. Paul Taylor established his company in 1954 in Manhattan along with five other dancers. The dance company since then has performed in 520 cities and 62 countries. Among other accomplishments, Taylor has won an Emmy award for outstanding choreographer for 1992’s Paul Taylor’s Speaking in Tongues.
Beloved Renegade premiered in 2008 and is inspired by the works of the great American poet Walt Whitman, and set to Francis Poulenc’s Gloria. Reviewing the work in February, The New York Times‘ Alastair Macauley called the piece “one of the great achievements of Mr. Taylor’s long career and one of the most eloquently textured feats of his singular imagination.”
The company will also perform two pieces in addition to Renegade. Mercuric Tidings (1982) uses excerpts from Franz Schubert’s first and second symphonies while Scudorama, an ADF-commissioned-work created in 1963, is described by the festival as a “gem most Taylor devotees haven’t seen, complete with a jazzy-classical score by Clarence Jackson.”
A male dancer catapults himself onto a small table on center stage. He slowly moves into a handstand, then contorts himself to lay perpendicular to the stage, supported by one hand. The audience clapped and cheered. It could only be a Cirque trick.
But which Cirque?
Obviously, what comes first to mind is Cirque du Soleil. I’ve never seen Cirque du Soleil live, but I grew up devoted to it on TV. Back in Bravo’s pre-Project Runway days, they used to air a lot of Cirque du Soleil specials, thus providing one of my first introductions to what I considered avant-garde theater. However, after the movie Knocked Up associated Cirque du Soleil with a bad mushroom trip in Las Vegas, the company probably lost a little of its claim to hipness.
In the past three weeks, I’ve seen two different cirques. However, neither was a Soleil. One was a media sneak peek at an upcoming show at Durham Performing Arts Center, and one was a performance with symphony accompaniment at Cary’s Koka Booth Amphitheatre.
The sneak peek was for a Florida-based outfit called Cirque Dreams, which has a new production it’s calling Illumination. Naturally, light is a major portion: The video consisted of glow-in-the-dark objects that resembled flags and a line drawing of stair-steps reminiscent of a page from Harold and the Purple Crayon. A character called The Director features prominently, whose main characteristic is blowing a whistle with such frequency to rival the Grandmother in The Triplets of Belleville. As much as we could glean from the film, the show is devoted to acrobatics featuring one-handed balancing acts and aerial spinning with rings and scarves.
After the video screened, three performers came onstage to entertain the audience. Two of the dancers in red hounds-tooth suits performed a pantomime involving one being controlled by the other. The third, clad in a sparkly tank top and sailor pants, balanced on a small platform and did the ever-popular one-handed handstand, gaining applause from the assembled media.
Cirque Dreams takes the stage at DPAC from Sept. 15-20. Here’s video from Illumination:
Lisa Creech Bledsoe on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": "Speed dating for the tech set," funny! Nice write up of an incredible event. I'm voting for Scrubby next year. Scrub-by, Scrub-by, Scrub-by!
Lisa aka @glowbird (the boxing chick)
DK on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": Just moved back to the Triangle from Seattle, which is where Ignite started. It kind of caught on and blew up really fast, and organizers had to keep upping the venue.
I think people have been looking for this kind of cabaret for a while. They like going somewhere and being a crowd together, and it's
Christine Fawley on "Notes from IgniteRaleigh: To be a spark, and not to be rickrolled": A fabulous night highlighting the diversity of talent and intellectual pursuits here in the Triangle. An event like this could be held every month and still barely scratch the surface of the passions of our community.
We were honored to be included and appreciated the support and enthusiasm of the crowd as we delivered "20
