Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1984 - 25

,howed superb, free-wheeling renderngs and costumes for A Tableau jar
'v1erveilleuse, The Beasts oj WaI~ and
~e

COllu?die de Souparance.
Canada: Our neighbors to the north

)lit on a fine show! Actual costumes,
leaddresses, and models were hand,omely displayed. Meredith Caron's
:ostumes for The Saga oj the Wet Hells
vere brightly-colored and energetic.
;ally Benson's work on The Woman,
rhe Mikado, and A Midsummer Night's
Jrealll for the Strat ford Shakespearean
~estival were rich and elegant, as might
)e expected.
Bulgaria: This exhibit hooked my
nterest right away; the work was immeliate, beautifully executed and richly
laried. I liked particularly Svetlana
:::vetkov's funky, antic Measure jar
'v1easure; evena Kavaldziev's combi!ation of black-and-white and color
'igures for The Old Man and the Ar"OIv; M iglena Kasask' s very elegant
:lI1ilia Calolli; Georgi
ozarov's
'artoon-like, folk-influenced, na'lve,
ort of paint-by-number approach to
rhe Cruel Animal; Cajka Petrusev's
]uilted cut-and-paste Hamlet; and Kontantin Radev's loose Doctor Miracle
lIld Arturo Ui.
New Zealand: Boyce Raymond's
VillY costumes for The Rivals and sug:estive ideas for Bingo led me to suspect
here's more going on "down there"
han I had thought. The Rivals was deightfully done in pencil and revealed
lever characters in costume. Billgo
vas subtle in gray on gray on gray.
Japan: The only costumes displayed
his year were three pieces designed by
iigeo Kawamori for Macbeth. While
hese macrame and braided leather
lieces were handsome enough, and inerestingly antique Japanese, they
acked the genius shown in 1975 when
Ie won a richly-deserved Gold Medal.
>erhaps three costumes were simply
lot enough to demonstrate the conepts clearly. I was most impressed with
he late Kaoru Kanamori's stunning seting for Serban's Japanese production
If The Seagull and for a production of
rhe Elephal/t Mal/. Generally, howver, the Japanese exhibit lacked the
ivid excitement I still recall from eight
ear~ ago.
Yugoslavia: Excitement tingled
hroughout thi5 entry. Masterful renlering5 ranged widely in technique, from
omewhat abstract finger-paint and

Vicll1amc,e CO;'lumc. PholO: Jarka Burian.

spatter over very elegant pencil renderings (for a production of Tachana designed by Zora Zevadinovic-Davidovic),
to handsome crayon execution for a production of Flying all the Spot designed
by Djordji Zdravev. How frustrating
not to be able to see these costumes in
performance!
Other Yugoslav observations: Milica
Radovanovic sent three furry, hairy,
heavily-textured tartars for Wakeell
Voushjik and Bozana Jovanovic recalled Carrie Robbins' complexity with
her heavily knit and braided King Lear.
Milena Jeftic- icev's grand white figures on a gray painted board for Adam
alld Eve and Ljerka Kalcic's subtle grey /
blue figures with red lips for Twentieth
Cel/tury Orpheus were stunning. Cutand-paste was skillfully represented by
Ana Atanackovic's brightly-colored
The Malldrake and Helena VolfarlKojoviC's mixture of paper and fabric
marker for The Uprising of the CoquillS. J asna ovak text ured her vaguely Elizabethan figures for The COI/queror entirely with paint. Possibly the
niftiest and least-seen technique-dyeon-fabric-was represented by Sanja
Dzeba's figure5 for The Malldrake-

which combined natural backgrounds
with built-on animal heads-and Mirjana Markovic's clever folk for Stanoje
Clavas. The work from Yugoslaviaas from many other countries-just
bursts with good energy and sureness in
direction.
England: John Bury wrote in the
PQ catalog that' 'theatre design reflects
the cultural and artistic heritage of a nation." The British exhibit clearly
demonstrated the richness of the English heritage by bringing gorgeous period evocations and the campiest kitsch
imagi na ble- suggest ive leather-clad
freakos and elegantly correct ladies. Designs by Annena Stubbs, Yolanda Sonnabend, Carl Toms, David Short, John
Gunter, Timothy Goodshild, Ariane
Gastambide, Johan Engels, Roger
Bourke and Maria Bjornson represented
the range of British costume creations.
Student Exhibitions: Some of the
countries bringing student costume
work were Belgium, Canada, Britain,
Hungary, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. And much of it was smashing. An exciting glimpse of the artistry
to come. Although there was more selfindulgence present because of the nature of the projects-and in some cases,
an art-school approach-many students demonstrated a sure control of
their media.
Some of the nifty ideas were painting over a ground composed of a collage of famous paintings from the same
time period as the rendering to give a
sense of heritage, and skctching a series
of figures on the page-progressing
from a nude body to one dressed in undergarments to one over-dressed. Another series depicted a single character's multiple changes on one board.
There was an impressive honesty in most
of the work, an attempt to face the design problem squarely and to solve it
without artifice. Very reassuring, these
students and this positive energy, towards enriching our art.
D

Don Stowell is a costume designer / historian and serves as t he Associate Dean
of the School of Theatre at Florida State
University. He has participated in two
quadrennials-PQ75 and PQ83.

USITT ISpring t98-l/Thealre Design & Technolog)

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 1984