Theatre designer admired for wild costumes
PREVIEW
What: Tempest Orion Project: panel discussion with Eloise Kazan, Ralph Alan Cohen, David Ferry, Alison Jeffers and Meg Roe. Where: Phoenix Theatre, University of Victoria When: Friday, 1 p.m. Admission: Free
Designer Eloise Kazan provided real bang for the buck when creating a costume for an adaptation of Titus Andronicus.
For The Titus Procession,a Mexican performance project inspired by Shakespeare’s tragedy, Kazan fashioned a wedding outfit from 2,000 bullet casings.
It was for the character of Tamora, Queen of the Goths. The bullets poked from Tamora’s crown in porcupine fashion. Meanwhile, her dress (weighing 68 kilograms) was attached to a wheeled metal petticoat pushed by the actor like a walker.
“I actually got the bullets donated by the Mexican army. They’re real,” said Kazan, a globetrotter based in Mexico City.
“My idea was a very literal metaphor; instead of marrying for love, she’s marrying to arm herself against her enemies.”
Chuckling at the memory, Kazan recalled washing the bullet casings in her bathtub to remove gunpowder residue. Her concern was that any powder might be ignited by a burning baby carriage that followed Tamora at all times (it represented her son, Alarbus, who’d been hacked to pieces and burned).
Also for The Titus Procession, Kazan designed a dinner dress made from bread that appears to be soaked in blood-red wine. During the course of the performance, Tamora eats her dress , revealing herself as naked and vulnerable.
Widely admired for her fantastical costumes, Kazan is visiting the University of Victoria’s theatre department this week. She’s participating in the Tempest Orion Project, for which a team of renowned international theatre experts works with students on different ways of staging Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Kazan is an in-demand designer who won the top prize for costume design at the 2007 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, an international exhibition of performance design and theatre architecture.
Travelling to such locales as New York, Croatia and Spain, she creates costumes and sets for theatre, dance, opera and film. Kazan flew here from New York City, where she did costume work for the independent movie Split, filmed in an abandoned sugar factory.
The other Orion Project participants include Shakespeare scholar Ralph Alan Cohen (he helped oversee the building of a replica of the Bard’s theatre in Staunton, Virginia), applied-theatre expert Alison Jeffers from the University of Manchester, actor/director David Ferry, and Meg Roe, an actor, director and sound designer who has worked with the Shaw Festival and the National Arts Centre.
Speaking as part of a panel this week, Kazan recalled what first hooked her on theatre design. When she was three or four years old, her mother took her to see a production of The Tempest in Romania (the daughter of a Mexican diplomat, Kazan lived all over the world growing up).
The little girl was amazed by actors who appeared to walk on a pool of red water that was part of the set.
“I said: ‘Mother, how can they stand on blood?’ ” Kazan told the crowd.
At home, using dolls, her mother explained how actors provided the illusion by standing on platforms under the water’s surface. It’s part of the magic of theatre, she added.
Although she was young, something about the performance left an indelible mark on Kazan.
“I wanted to be that magician who makes people walk on blood,” she said.
At university, Kazan initially studied visual art. But drawing came naturally to her; she found it wasn’t enough. She realized she wanted to make art as part of a storytelling process.
So she enrolled in design studies at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, in Bristol, England.
“For me, the most interesting part is actually telling a story … If it doesn’t have that context, that narrative, then it means nothing to me,” Kazan said.
Often, her costume designs suggest sci-fi fantasy, with nods to period dress. They’re wild and inventive. To keep grounded, she sometimes purposely designs for productions that “just require jeans and T-shirts.”
That said, Kazan is well aware that her heart lies in the world of imagination.
“If I was a painter, I’d probably use big colours and big brushes,” she said, laughing.