Bunnies and beyond
A big part of Aussie circus show Beyond is the costumes. Olivia Wannan talks to costume designer Libby McDonnell on bear suits, bunnies and acrobats.
THE trapeze artists have awed, the contortionists have astonished and the balancing act has gone off without a hitch – the crowd roars with applause at their superhuman effort.
Just as hard-working, though, are the Beyond performers’ costumes. The various suits, leotards, masks and head-dresses have gone through a rehearsal period almost as long as the acrobats themselves, show costume designer Libby McDonnell says.
‘‘With circus, there’s always an absolutely non-negotiable technical requirement that the costume has to fill, otherwise it’s dangerous. The costume is part of their apparatus,’’ she says.
‘‘The function and the form often have a little bit of a battle.’’
That skirmish often comes to a head on the Chinese pole in particular, McDonnell says.
‘‘It’s such a beautiful apparatus but it’s so hard on costumes . . . I want to beat this pole that shreds costumes on a daily basis.’’
Despite months of preparation and everything thrown at them in rehearsals, the gear still occasionally reaches breaking point at the worst possible moment, she says.
McDonnell is back in Australia while the crew are on the current leg of their international tour, which includes eight performances of Beyond at the New Zealand Festival.
The show is a ‘‘kooky’’ take on the concept of transformation, she says. ‘‘[We were] looking at ways our physical being transforms in and out of the animal and human – if there were particular essences of animals that exist inside these individual performers.’’
Audiences will see Alice in Wonderland- like white rabbits take the stage, and a man in a bear suit make a slippery climb up a pole.
The beast-within theme certainly gave McDonnell’s job an extra layer of complexity – and peculiarity. ‘‘ We were travelling back from Berlin, taking a couple of the bunny heads back with us in a large duffel and I was thinking, ‘if Customs checks this bag on the way in, I’m definitely going to have to explain something’.
‘‘When you see what that particular performer does in that bear suit, your struggle is so minuscule compared to what they do every single night in it.’’
For one of the toughest costume gigs there is, McDonnell was a relative design novice before joining the Circa company, which is based in Brisbane. She had previously studied contemporary dance and architecture, when a choreographer friend asked her to fill in when he lost his costume designer unexpectedly.
‘‘It terrified me – but when you do something that really scares you, you know it really means something to you then.’’