Prairie persona on pointe
In theatre, costume designers dress their characters. In ballet, they undress them.
That’s because when a story is being told through the physical language of dance, the way it is in Alberta Ballet’s Balletlujah!, skin and gesture tell as much as a well-turned collar or a puffy sleeve.
“It’s like muting a singer if you overdress them,” says Alberta Ballet’s Jean Grand-Maître.
“Something about the muscles and the skin and the emotion of the skin. It’s very challenging to design for dance, because it has to be so longlasting.
“They roll on the floor, men lift them up, fabrics can’t be slippery, they have to be sewn in a way that can last forever and then you have to, as I was saying, undress the dancer — if you put too much fabric on them, you lose the dance.”
The costume designer in charge of it all is Ann Seguin-Poirier, a Montreal designer who has worked in the past with Cirque du Soleil.
She met Grand-Maître while working on the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, which she describes as one big play.
The first surprise came when they sat down to talk about how to dress the various characters.
“He explained (that) it’s not the same with dancers as it is with actors,” she says. “With an actor, you spend a lot of time with them understanding their character. But a dancer does not play a character — they play the essence of a character. It’s more impressionistic.”
Adding to that was Grand-Maître’s desire to reflect a kind of Prairie mythic theme throughout every aspect of the Balletlujah!, which is based on the music of Alberta’s own k.d. lang.
“I also gave her (Ann) a book by Maxwell Bates,” he says.
“Now Maxwell was a painter from Alberta who grew up (in Calgary) and went to Paris and hung around Salvador Dali and all those guys. He painted Prairie people in, I think, the most exceptional way. ...
“His art inspired the drawings for the costumes and how we were going to represent the Prairie people with dignity.”
For a costume designer, the design aspect is only one part of the issue.
“Technology has changed so that you can print almost anything now, but we still have to find out if we can print it, and it has to be on synthetic material,” explains Seguin-Poirier. “And a dancer must be able to move in it.”
Another challenge Grand-Maître presented to Seguin-Poirier came from his efforts to symbolize lang’s spiritual side.
“I wanted there to be an animal in the ballet because it’s the Prairies and I always imagined people who grow up in the middle of nowhere like that to have a more profound relationship with nature and animals.”
What he wasn’t counting on was lang, who’s a practising Buddhist, choosing the crow.
“In my mythology, that I know, the crow was (meant to symbolize) death,” Grand-Maître says. “Vincent Van Gogh painted crows flying toward him on his last painting before he committed suicide, and so the crow for me was death. But apparently in Buddhism, the crow is your protector.”
Grand-Maître introduced a character who appears mostly in projected video images before appearing at the end of the ballet. Then it was up to Seguin-Poirier to create a crow costume the dancers could dance in.
They considered using real feathers, but the cost was prohibitive, so they went with making feathers out of organza.
Seguin-Poirier is a kind of architect of the body in a constant tug of war between beauty and functionality.
“You can get torn between being creative and being functioning,” she says.
“It has to be beautiful, but a dancer must also be able to move.
“And you have to be able to wash it — they sweat so much! — without damaging (the costume). It must be washed after every performance.”