Sacred Truths

Deborah Rosenberg: Costume Designer

June 09, 2020 Emmy Graham Season 1 Episode 6
Sacred Truths
Deborah Rosenberg: Costume Designer
Show Notes Transcript

Deborah Rosenberg is a professor of costume design who has been a member of the Theatre Arts faculty at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon since 1999. She currently teaches costume design as well as classes in stage makeup and costume crafts. Deborah is a founding faculty member of the Master of Theatre Studies in Production and Design Program and serves as its Program Coordinator.

Deborah came to Southern Oregon from New York State where she taught costume design at Niagara University, SUNY: Brockport, and Ithaca College, and was a guest draper at Cornell University. Deborah also has worked as a freelance costume designer and has designed costumes for theatre productions in Spain, Canada and throughout the United States. 

To view her portfolio, please visit: deborahrosenberg.carbonmade.com

Or email Deborah directly at: rosenbergd@sou.edu

 I spoke to her in Ashland, Oregon in 2020.

Music by Manpreet Kaur. @manpreetkaurmusic

www.sacred-truths.com

This is the fun part of costume design that when we choose clothing to wear, we are choosing an eloquent expression of self. Right now, you and I are both wearing sort of summer clothes, so we’re comfortable, we’re practical, but we presumably chose colors and textures that feel like ourselves. And so, every single day, our clothing is speaking volumes on who we are in ourselves, in our state of mind, in our families, our communities, our culture and our world. I’m a costume designer not because I like clothes, because people are fascinating and what people wear tells us in what ways they are fascinating. 

Deborah Rosenberg is a professor of costume design who has been a member of the Theatre Arts faculty at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon since 1999. She currently teaches costume design as well as classes in stage makeup and costume crafts. Deborah is a founding faculty member of the Master of Theatre Studies in Production and Design Program and serves as its Program Coordinator.

Deborah came to Southern Oregon from New York State where she taught costume design at Niagara University, SUNY: Brockport, and Ithaca College, and was a guest draper at Cornell University. Deborah also has worked as a freelance costume designer and has designed costumes for theatre productions in Spain, Canada and throughout the United States. 

To view her portfolio, please visit: deborahrosenberg.carbonmade.com

Or email Deborah directly at: rosenbergd@sou.edu

 I spoke to her in Ashland, Oregon in 2020.

 

Emmy: Good morning, Deborah, thank you for joining me this morning. 

Deborah Rosenberg: My pleasure, Emmy. I’m delighted to be here.

Emmy: Please tell us a little bit about what a theater costume designer does.
 
 DR: I’d be glad to. In an academic setting, a costume designer teaches costume design as well as my job is to supervise student costume designers and assistant costumer designers as well as I design one of our 6 main shows each year. A professional costume designer has a slightly different job. And typically those people work freelance doing many, many jobs at a time.

Emmy: What is costume design? What is a person’s job as a costumer designer from start to finish, can you give us a brief summary?

DR: I can try. Typically, if I’m assigned or assign myself to any given show…. 

Two years ago, I did a production of “A Winter’s Tale” by William Shakespere, directed by my colleague, David McCandless.   My job was from start to finish, first of all to read the play many times, and kind of flag costume matters: If the character takes something out of their pocket, if we know in the story they’ve been up for days and days worrying, that affects the clothes. The weather affects the clothes. The time and place of the play affects the clothes. So at the first readings of the play, I note all those things: 

Where are we? When is it? What do the people need to wear as the play continues. So, I research that using many, many sources. Then I sketch it out in rough form, the first time. I show it to the director to see if the director approves… 

Emmy: You actually make sketches of people wearing these clothes that will appear on stage. 

DR: Yes, so part of my job is to be able to read a play closely and with intention and part of my job is to be able to draw people and clothes, and then part of my job is to be able to communicate those ideas both visually and verbally, first too the director and then to the costume shop so that we then start the process of building the clothes. We prefer to say “building” than ‘making’ because it sounds more professional.

Emmy: So presumably, the clothes have to match the period, or the clothes have to match the director’s vision. How does that come in to play? 

DR: Again, our production of “A Winter’s Tale” was loosely set nowhere in particular, with kind of a nod to Classic Gothic Shapes that most people think of that’s what fairy tales look like. The director’s very fond of sort of flowing garments, and long flowing hair and gracefulness. 

So, this was a big show. So, we couldn’t build all the clothes from scratch, in an academic situation, we rarely can build everything, but we try to build as much as we can; so once the first drawings were approved, and the final sketches were completed, this time colored in so we know what the colors are, what the fabrics are.
 Then there’s a team of people called the drapers, who with the costume shop supervisor, those are the folks who interpret the flat costume sketch into pattern pieces and then into muslin mock-ups to start figuring out the shapes and patterns for the real clothes. Meantime, I’m buying the fabrics that the real clothes will be made out of. 

And in this particular place, because we didn’t have a huge budget, we had two worlds. 

“A Winter’s Tale” takes place in the austere cold world of one country and the warm, bucolic world of a different  country. So we took men’s suits from stock and we added funnel collars and deep, deep cuffs to make them look more otherworldly. So, it’s taking a standard shape and modifying it so it looked more fairy-tale and more royal. So that was the cold, austere world.

For the warm, bucolic world, we took our vast stock of muslin, sort of peasant shirts: loose shirts with open collars and sort of full sleeves and I found a heavily embroidered tablecloth while I was wandering through antique stores, and we cut out the floral motifs and sewed them onto the shirts to make it look like peasant embroidery. 

So with every choice we’re making a bigger and bigger distinction between the cold, former world and the kind of relaxed, loose and loving world. 

Emmy: So, depending on the departments’ budget, the costume designer might have to be very creative. 

DR: It’s part of the fun, actually. I was trained at a school with healthy budgets and plenty of money. And then when I started working professionally I was working in situations where there resources were far, far fewer, so the creativity had to get much more specific.  

Because I always maintain, I tell my students it takes four things to make a play: Time, money, people to do the work, and then the 4th and most important thing: is the creativity. If you don’t have much time, you need more money, and more people and more creativity. If you don’t have much time and you don’t have much money, you need a lot of help and a lot of creativity. And if you don’t have much time, money or people, all you’ve got is creativity, but that’s the most important thing. So, any, any play can be designed using that secret weapon. 

Emmy: Have you ever designed something only to say, “Oh gosh, I got it wrong, or that particular thing has to go?” 

DR: Yes. Sometimes we just run out of time and we run out ideas. Years ago, we did a production of “The Orestia”, which is a very long, it’s 3 plays in one, it’s close to 4 hours of Greek Theater. Strangely, none of my friends would come to see the play. And at the end we have both Athena who comes in at the end to kind of make peace. And Apollo. Two gods. Athena’s job is to sort of represent order and balance. And Apollo’s job is to sort of represent the future. 

And for reasons that I still am bewildered by, Athena was wearing a fabulous gold breast plate, and a full circle skirt and a wonderful diadem and she looked fabulous.  Apollo, for whatever reason, I put him in leather pants and a silk shirt from a catalogue, called, oh, I’ve lost its name, but a catalogue of trendy, trendy clothes for the smart set man in Florida. To this day, it’s been almost 20 years, I think, “Really, leather pants!”

Emmy: (laughs) Not quite right for our god. (laughs) Can you just talk a little bit about how the costume is all part of the vision of the play? 
 
 DR: Every time a director explores a play, he/she or they is looking to sort of see, “What story do we want to tell this time?”  So, you could do “Winter’s Tale” every year for decades and tell the story slightly differently each time. So, typically a director, a good director, thinks through, what they want their world to look like and feel like. So, that we generally start with the phrase we use is “the world of the play”. So, and typically, we start with the scenery. So, we set the world in what it needs to look like and feel like. In “The Winter’s Tale”, we’re in the castle, it’s cold, it’s dark, it’s a lot of pointy shapes. So the clothing then comes next. We design scenery, then clothing, and then lighting and then sound.

And all those pieces work together, hopefully, if the director has been good at communicating and the designers are doing our jobs, then we’re all finding a way, through our own medium, to show that that world is either cold or austere or warm and sunny. So, again, the scenery was very geometric. The costumes in that scene were very geometric. The sound was rich, but fairly staccato. And the light had many, many harsh angles as though it was coming from a huge, high distance and not really warming the room So all four elements, ideally, are working together to help the audience see, feel and strangely know what environment they’re in and what they might expect from this story. 

Emmy: How were you drawn to this field? 

DR: Great question. I wanted to be an actor. I, for a time, was an actor. I don’t think I was a very good actor. 

Emmy: How old were you? 

DR: I wanted to be an actor from the time I was quite small. But I was terrified, and I was a very, very, very shy as a child and couldn’t bring myself to audition for anything. 

And by the time I got to University, I was a little braver. And through a very random series of fortunes, I found myself upon one occasion trying to rescue an inebriated trumpet player who had collapsed in the Senior common room after their concert. I was small and he was big. I was trying to drag his inert body to safety, when suddenly someone picked up his feet and made the job much simpler. 

When I looked up to see who had rescued me, the person was a small, dapper philosophy professor who I knew by sight. And we got into conversation. He said, “What are you doing?” and I explained. And he asked me where I was from and what I was studying. 

And it turned out that he was one of the professors, who had suggested that University recruit from a wider geographical area. So, these lovely recruiters had come to my high school, to say, we have the perfect university for you. So, when the professor found out I was one of his ‘successes’, he suddenly, looked me up and down and said, “Ooo, do you want to be a fairy?” 

Because apparently, he was directing the production of “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” and he was short a few fairies. (chuckles) So, I joined the cast, had an amazing time and then we did a few plays together, this group of people. 

But one day, we were waiting for, his name was Allen Ornstein, he changed my life. We were waiting for Allen to arrive; he was always late for rehearsal.  And he came in worried that day and he looked around the group of us, about 8 or 9 and he said, “Do any of you people know how to sew?” I tentatively raised my hand and he said, “Aha!  Excellent, you’re the costume designer!” 

Emmy: (laughs) What was your major in college through all this? 
 
 DR: Anthropology. 

Emmy: Goodness! And you could sew! 

DR: I could sew and I thought I don’t know what it is to be a costume designer but that feels right. 

Emmy: So, did you make the costumes for the show? 

DR: I did. I cut them out on my living room rug, we built the show. I didn’t know what I was doing, I was mostly following instructions, and I then I lived a double life: acting in plays and also sort of learning to costume them. 
 Our school had no theater department, strangely, but plays were performed by a professor from the English Department and Allen Orstein from the philosophy department. 

And in our 2nd or 3rd year, we decided to pool our resources and everyone decided to do a production of “The Tempest” together. And that was the show I really designed because it needed to sort of have a certain feel. 

I was also playing Ariel, so it was again, a changing moment in my life where I started to really think about what costume design is and needs to be and how it needs to fit in to the greater whole. 

Emmy: Wow. Would you call that show a success in terms of your costumes?
 
 DR: There were a number of probably really serious flaws, but we were working with no budget and no help, it was just me and my sewing machine. We were young, that helped. 

Emmy: You did it!

DR: We did it. Everybody involved in that production considers that production a success. We were very, very proud of it.

There’s a lot of people in uniform in “The Tempest”. There’s the royal party who’ve been marooned on the island, because Prospero needs to get revenge. And we didn’t have uniforms. But I bought used chefs’ coats and pants from a linen company and I dyed them many, many, many colors. And to my eye they looked plausibly like soldiers. 

Emmy: Wow. 
 
 DR: I don’t know what the audience thought, but I was proud.

Emmy: (chuckles) That’s great. And then you finished college and said, “That’s it, I want to be a costume designer”? 


 DR: I finished college and then said, “I want to be an actor!” The plan was my friend, Sheila McGilvery and I were going to acting school in Toronto. We sussed it out, we figured it out. 
 
 Emmy: You’re not from Toronto. 

DR: No, no. But the school where I was in Peterborough, Ontario, east of Toronto, so Toronto is the nearest big city. That summer my father died and plans changed. My mother needed me at home and I couldn’t go to acting school. And my mother had this strange fantasy that I was going to work on Wall Street like my father had done. So while I was trying to take acting classes in the evening, I gradually was working on Wall Street by day. And life got stranger and stranger. Some of the chronology gets fuzzy over time. 


 But, that job ended, and moved to California, started teaching Junior High School and didn’t have a degree to teach junior high school, so I realized I had to go to graduate school in order to be a proper junior high teacher. Then it occurred to me, at this time I was doing costuming for a local community theater, it occurred to me if I was considering grad school, maybe I should go to grad school in costume design and really become a proper costume designer, so that’s what I did. 


 Emmy: You’ve mentioned some of these, but what skills does a good costume designer needs to have? 
 
DR: The most important of all is communication, being able to clearly explain one’s ideas and really, really listen to other people’s ideas. That is absolutely paramount.  

Good researching skills, are tremendously helpful, a knowledge of costume history, tremendously helpful, a love of costume history, really helpful. Life drawing skills, being able to draw realistic looking humans in appropriate proportionate and then to be able to draw the detail of any given period and the movement and volume of clothes is tremendously important.

Patience really helps; a spirt of compromise, really helps. Curiosity, as in everything in life, is tremendously helpful. 

Emmy: Do you have to know how to sew so that you can tell if your designs are plausible, that someone can actually create?
 
 DR: We find, where I teach now, we ask our costume construction students to take some costume design so that they can interpret costume sketches, and we insist that our costume design students take some costume construction so they know how fabric works.  So, it’s really helpful if I draw a costume sketch that can be built as opposed to something that fabric will not do. 

Emmy: Right. 

DR: So, it makes a difference. It really helps that I can sew, but it’s not necessary mandatory that all costume designers do so. 

Emmy: So what art forms were you drawn to as a child.?  Could you draw when you started graduate school, and clearly, you started sewing as a child, perhaps. What kind of things were your naturally good at in terms of creating and artistic work?

DR: That’s a fun question. My mother is an artist, a painter and draws. So I’ve been drawing since I was a tiny person. I vividly remember the day she taught me how to draw hands when I was five. She said, “Start with a mitten” and then you can draw a hand. I still teach my students that.  

Emmy: Because you have to draw hands!

DR: Yep. A lot of costume designers put their hands in their pockets or behind their backs, That’s kind of cheating.  As tiny, I drew pictures all the time. I sort of made my own paper dolls. I would draw a little person and then I’d draw their little outfits for their different activities. Their tennis outfit, their party dress. 

Emmy: (laughs) You were designing your own paper doll clothes.  

DR: Yes. I painted and I sewed. My grandfather was in the textile industry when I was small and one year, he had a surplus of wine-colored velour so he gave me 25 yards of wine-colored velour, and I made, I couldn’t sew yet, really, but I sort of draped gladiator costumes for my brother’s GI Joes, and princess dresses for my Francie doll. So, I kind of I taught myself to sew when I needed more complex clothes and I needed them to stay on the doll.  I think I taught myself to sew by the time I was 11 years old so I made clothes, not very successfully.

Emmy: Using simplicity patterns, things like that? 
 
 DR: Yep. 

Emmy: You just naturally gravitated to it. 

DR: Yep. 

Emmy: Did you get better at sewing? 

DR: (laughs) Mercifully, yes, I tended not to read the instructions for some reason. I found them boring. And often with sewing, if you fail to read the instructions, you can sort of sew yourself into a corner. You can’t do the next step because you’ve already attached the wrong pieces. So, I think, by the time, I think I was 11 or 12 when I finally finished a full-length gray wool flannel skirt that I loved, and my dad was so proud that I’ve actually finished something and he kept saying, “Where’s that lovely skirt you made?” that’s when I realized the value of reading the instructions all the way through.

Emmy: Before you start. 

DR: Before you start and not half way through when you don’t understand what the pieces look like.  

Emmy: Let’s talk about objects, hand made things, such as hand-made tools, potter, furniture, implements, as opposed to mass-produced functional objects. As they reveal their beauty, we become attached to them, and we form a relationship to them, and I would go so far as to say these hand-made things have soul. And if we only surround ourself with these mass-produced functional objects, we start to become numb to our own world. I’d love to hear your comments on this. 

DR: I agree completely. I think everything has a soul. Well-loved tools, I have some of my father’s tools, and those have tremendous meaning to me. All objects with any kind of history have tremendous meaning to me. 

I tend to associate the object with when I acquired it, when I made it, when it was given to me.
 Which means, there’s also the down side. If a beautiful object given to me by a person to which we have a terrible a falling out, the object carries that energy and I have to give it away. 

I love to take classes in woodworking. I took a class in wood turning, and the tools are beautiful. Massive chisels, massive lathes, and watching the curls of wood come away from the bowl as the bowl takes shape is unbelievably satisfying. 

I took another class in woodworking using only hand tools and were told to plane our wood, not sand it. And again, I had no idea that planing wood was the most satisfying peaceful activities ever. I love antique stores and cherish hand- made textiles, doilies, and embroidery, and tablecloths with lovely patterns. 
 
 Emmy: Because there’s an energy imbued in the work from the person who created it. 

DR: Yep, every time. And you can feel a piece that was made with care and pride and you can see a piece that was made in a huge noisy factory with no one having time to think. 

Emmy: Yeah. 
 
 DR: I prefer the pieces with care and pride.

Emmy: Yes, I’m reminded of a christening dress that I have that is handmade, and my mother was baptized in it, her sister was baptized in it, and my two brothers and myself were baptized in this garment. And when I hold it, it is an unbelievable feeling. 

DR: I can only imagine because, you know, as you’re speaking, I’m imagining what it looks like. And that, that legacy of tiny people receiving that profound experience. 

Emmy: It’s a hand-made, intricately laced, piece of….it’s a dress from the 1920’s, it’s exquisite. 
 DR: That must be gorgeous; I would love to see it. 

Emmy: You’ve been working with your hands pretty much your whole life. Why is working with your hands, creating with our hands, hand crafts like, knitting, sewing, woodworking. Why is that so important?

DR: It’s a great question. At the top of my head, it’s what hands are for. They’re amazing, hands. I’m grateful for mine, every day of my life. You think about humans since the beginning of humanity, and we use our hands for obtaining food, nurturing the little ones, grasping the world, moving through time. And then, when we have leisure, we make things. All humans make things. And we make things for practical purposes. We make nets for catching fish. 

But every single culture in the world makes things for beauty. That’s profound to me. That if given a little bit of time, and a little bit of space, a human will make something beautiful, just because that’s what humans do. 

Emmy: It is an expression of what I would call, our divinity, an expression of our soul, and perhaps of our heart. 

DR: I agree. 
 
 Emmy: You mentioned this earlier, and you once told me if you don’t like something in your home, if you have something there out of an obligation, a gift from a relative or something and it just isn’t you; it doesn’t vibrate with you, you don’t think it’s attractive, but you…many of us tend to hold on to it because “Oh gosh, Aunt Mary gave me when I got married, and I should just hold on to it.” You once told me you should give that away rather than keep something that doesn’t bring you joy. In other words, sometimes, objects in our lives, don’t serve us energetically. 

Would you elaborate on this? 

DR: Certainly. I’ve had the privilege of living by myself for many years until recently. And I discovered that because I did have control over every single object in my home, I could be very, very, um, intentional of what I keep and what I don’t. And because I think objects take on the feeling of their time and place, I’ve gone through my house a number of times deliberately removing things that reminded me of a time or a person. 

And I sort of get used to that, so I periodically review my possessions and try to minimize the number that I have and try to make sure than rather than, oh, 17 mismatched mugs, I have the one mug I really love to drink my morning coffee in. And that mugs becomes a friend, and gives me joy and because it’s the only one, it’s far more precious to me. 

Years ago, I admired a set of glasses on a friend’s shelf. I said, “Those are beautiful!” And she said, “I hate them!” And I said, “Why do you have them?” and she gave me the reason that you just mentioned, that they were a gift from a friend and the friend came over regularly. And it was important to her that she display the gift even though she found them unattractive.

And I thought that’s a terrible reason to have something in your house. If the person who gave it to you, truly gave it to you, they don’t need to see it because they gave it to you out of love. And she said, “I think you’re right!” and then she gave me the glasses. And I love them. I think it’s important. 

Emmy: That’s a beautiful story, and I remember when you shared this message with me years ago, it was so liberating because there were things in my house, that I looked at every day, and had this kind of revulsion, (“UGH!, I hate that ugly thing!, but it serves a purpose!”) and you gave me permission, it was very liberating, you gave me permission to get rid of it!

That’s pencil holder which is just awful! (“But it holds my pencils.”) Well, I could get a nice, attractive one instead. It’s a small thing! 

DR: It’s a small thing. And I think even if it something….My mother is very practical and functional. I said to her once, “How do you feel about the new refrigerator?” And she said, “It’s a refrigerator!”  And I thought, that doesn’t make sense to me. Of course it’s a refrigerator, it keeps her lettuce crisp, but why wouldn’t you want a refrigerator that makes you happy, why wouldn’t you want a pencil holder where the pencils look happier in there.  Don’t you want happy pencils? 
 
 Emmy (Laughs): Yes! And this brings us to loving our environment, loving our home, loving our living room. Let’s take about care for the home. I believe care for the home represents care for the soul.
 No matter how humble your home. With very little resources, we can be mindful of bringing beauty into our homes. We can put our milk into a pitcher for our tea instead of just having an ugly carton on the table. We can have a sweet vase of flowers rather than putting them in an old crumby jar.

Things like that can bring simple expressions of beauty into our home. And you once came to my home and you gave me overall simple, sweeping simple home design suggestions, because I had asked you to. For ways to bring beauty and balance into my home that reflected me, and that were affordable, and also that matched my way of expressing myself. 

Would you explain this process and maybe cite some ways that people can express themselves through art of home-design?

You have an eye for design, and it extends into the home, it extends beyond just costume design, into the home. How can people ensure that their home is an artful expression of themselves?

DR: I like to think about this a lot. You know the experience of going into someone’s home. Well, when I come to your house. It is harmonious, it feels peaceful, it feels nurturing. And that’s because you got very intentional about what you wanted around you. I think the first step is to remove anything that makes you feel bad, that gives you bad feeling because of where you got it or what it looks like.

Emmy: Like the glasses.  

DR: Yep. So first go through and take away anything that doesn’t feel right. I prefer to have fewer things in my house rather than more things. But some people feel very, very comforted with the entire collection of china dogs because they love every single one. So, I think, deciding what you want around you based on who you are is the first step. Now, if you live with other people, of course, there needs to be compromise. It would be great if everybody who lives in that space kind of gets together and say, this is what is important to me and that’s what important to you and it works for everybody.

Years ago, I would tidy my living room and it would never feel calm, and I realized the problem was I had too many colors. So, the next time I could afford to, I changed up that furniture and bought furniture that had fewer colors. 

So, I start with color and shape. And say, “What colors feel good around you. Are you a bright color person or are you a neutral color person?” I find fewer colors are more harmonious than many, many, many colors. Some people like the energy of bold splashes of color. So, it just depends on what resonates with that one person’s, or that family’s psyche of what feels best.

I find for me, fewer colors, simple shapes, and a reduction of clutter makes me feel better.

I currently live with my cousin who loves clutter, and likes metallic objects and electronic devices. And I’m having some trouble in my house at the moment, cause the surfaces have, to me, unpleasant objects, so all I can do is kind of corral my cousin’s harsh objects, so that mostly my eye moves against smooth shapes and smooth surfaces.

Emmy: And compromise is a characteristic of a good costume designer. (DR laughs) Even in the home environment. Presumably if one is fortunate enough one has her own bedroom which can reflect who you are, and perhaps the living room can be more of a communal, accepted design. 

DR: Again, the luxury of living by myself, every single room in the house was exactly the way I wanted it.  And now I have to concede that my home has to be comfortable for the other person who lives in it. 

But I think that no matter how many people are in any given home, even if each of those people has a corner to call their own, maybe it’s a desk, maybe it’s a bedroom, maybe it’s a bookcase, it can be exactly the way they want it, that helps create a greater harmony.

Emmy: Yes, this is also an issue with young parents who have little kids around the house. Your house becomes destroyed (laughs). It’s just a mess with blankets and toys. I remember experiencing that feeling when my daughter was little and someone told me: Just have a shelf in your closet that is kind of a little bit of a shrine to you, that you can open that closet door and you can look at it and it’s organized and it’s beautiful and you can just say, “Ah! There’s my harmony!” And sometimes our little corners are small indeed. 

DR: You know, I can have visual harmony in my home if I have everything exactly the way I want it. But that would mean the other person who lives there is marginalized and unhappy. So, every single day I, kind of as they say, have to pick my battles.

Is it really going to be a tragedy if there’s a phone on the kitchen table? Probably not. 

(Emmy laughs)

DR: So to have kind of psychological harmony, I have to give up my visual harmony.

Emmy: (laughs) I would love to compare fine art vs everyday art. Art museums are wonderful of course, but they give us a sense somehow that “REAL Art” is something outside our every day range of existence. However, if ordinary activities are carried out we mindfulness we are, in a way, creating art in our ordinary everyday lives.  How can someone who does not consider himself artistic in the traditional sense, someone who is not a painter, someone who is not a musician, or a writer, how can this person express this basic need in his everyday life? And what are ways that you think we ARE artistic, but we don’t even realize we are artistic. 

DR: Wonderful, huge question. This came up in a group I was with last week, of currently in the global pandemic, many people are producing art are in extraordinary volumes. Peoples are writing stories, poems, songs, painting, drawing, carving, creating, embroidering, needlepointing, just making art because a lot of people have more time on their hands. And one person of the group said, “I don’t know how to do any of those things.” And that’s a 2-part thought: well, it’s would be a great time to learn to do something that might be fun to do. And secondly, my sense is especially during difficult times, each day we create our lives and ourselves. 

For a lot of folks, getting up, getting bathed and getting dressed, is an act of will and creation. And then, how one sort of organizes one’s time, for those of us working remotely, for those of who cannot work, I think, there are lots and lots of way we can spend our day, either positively or negatively, and I think anything we do on the positive side is an act of profound creation. 

Emmy: Yes, and even the way we choose to set the table for that meal, that can be an artistic expression, or the way we even cook or place the food on the plate can be a beautiful demonstration of our own art. 

DR: I, recently, hung up fresh dish towels in my kitchen. And I chose the colors and the textures of the dish towels that I wanted to hang. And I decided I wanted two different colors that resonated with one another. Okay, hanging dishtowels is usually considered a more practical activity. But, one can make anything an act of creation. 

Emmy: Such as getting dressed. How do we express ourselves through our clothes? How is that an art form? 

DR: This is the fun part of costume design that when we choose clothing to wear, we are choosing an eloquent expression of self. You know, right now, you and I are both wearing sort of summer clothes, so we’re comfortable, we’re practical, but we also presumably chose colors and textures that feel like ourselves. So, every single day, our clothing is speaking volumes about who we are in ourselves, in our state of mind, in our families, our communities, our culture, and our world. I’m a costume designer not because I like clothes, I’m a costume designer because I think people are fascinating and what people wear tells us in what ways they are fascinating. 

Emmy: You must love travel. 

DR: (laughs) 
 Emmy: When you go to other cultures, I’m sure you look at fabrics and the clothes. 

DR: Fabric, clothes, shoes, jewelry, earrings, hairstyles, makeup, yes!

Emmy: And you learn a lot! 

DR: How a culture expresses themselves in the way that the culture typically wears, is endlessly interesting. 

One of the fun places to be is in an international airport, where people from all kinds of places, are moving through just being themselves and telling the story of who they are and where they’ve come from. 

Emmy: How is it when the imagination moves to deep places, the sacred is revealed? 
 
 DR: OOOOOH! Every breath we take, every breath we inhale, every breath we exhale, we are breathing in all that there is. And depending on one’s philosophy and one’s spirituality, as we were created, in whatever ways we decide that happened, we then, being the artifacts of creation, we then are creators ourselves. So, every time we breathe, every time we create, every day we live, this may be bigger than I have words for, but we are expressing all of creation. 
 
 Emmy: Can you explain how the creative process works for you? 
 
 DR: I once tried to describe how I draw a costume sketch, so this might be the closest I can get. You know, every time I read a play, I see the pictures in my head: I see the scenery, the lights, the costumes, the sound. I see the characters. As I’m reading the play, they are actually speaking about who they are. 

As I start to draw the costume sketch, I realized it’s as though I can see the figure from a great distance and as I’m physically drawing on the page, I, sort of an internal joke, I’m drawing them closer.
 So, as I draw the image I saw at a great distance is coming into clarity on the page. So, as I draw, they become more specific and more real. Where they came from in the first place, that I’m not sure I know. 

Emmy: Costume design touches on something very deeply. It is trying to capture an emotion, and it is trying to capture a person’s true character.

DR: Yes. And if we do it right, as soon as the actor wearing that costume steps onto the stage, surrounded by the context of the scenery, maybe underscored by the sound, and illuminated by the light, the audience should know volumes about that character before they even speak. They should know, “Oh! That’s the king!” or “Oh, that’s the thief!” 

Emmy: Right.

DR: And, costume design is not just what the character is wearing, it’s their hair, it’s their makeup, does the character bite their fingernails, do they have little nibbled fingernails? Is the character dusty? 

Are the clothes new, or are the old, are they clean, are they unkempt. 
 In class, we often make lists of what costumes can express about a character. list. And the list can go into the thousands of things a costume can say about a character.  
 
 Emmy: And you’re also concerned about purses, and bags, and… is that correct those kinds of things? 
 
 DR: Yep. Glasses, and hats, and umbrellas and wallets, keys… 
 
 Emmy: And they all require thought; it can’t just be any old umbrella. 

DR: Right. It has to be the right one.

Emmy: (chuckles) It’s fascinating!

DR: It’s great fun. Sometimes our days are long, and there’s a lot of pressure frequently. But, in the sheer creation part of it when I have the luxury just to sit and think about the character….

We play a game, okay: The character got up that morning expecting a regular day, what would they put on? As opposed to the king got up that morning waiting for the coronation, that’s a different kind of day. 
 I imagine what a character’s closet looks like to see what clothing they chose for each day based on what they have, just like we make our choices each day based on what kind of day we think we’re having. 

Emmy: It’s much the work an actor has to do, you have to really know the character inside and out. Would costume design differ for film?

DR: Not in principle, but yes, in detail and specificity, and I know a lot less about film than theater but colors and textures makes a huge difference because of the medium of film, whereas for stage, depending on how close the audience physically is to these characters, it’s a different level of detail that you have to achieve, based on proximity or distance.

Emmy: And you were drawn to theater, never drawn to film. 

DR: I love theater. I love words. I love the shared experience of watching a live play. I realized one day, reading the stage directions for “Cyrano de Bergerac”, that the experience we all have, we’re sitting in the theater, we’re chatting, we’re looking through our programs, and we’re thinking about what we had for dinner. And the lights are on. 

Then the stage lights go dark. And then the lights come up on stage. I realized suddenly that that’s the experience of night and day. Every time the house goes dark, we are in night, and then the stage lights come up, and suddenly we’re in a brand-new day where a story is going to be told to us. 

And that moment of darkness, where the audience sits together, thirty people, 3000 people, it doesn’t matter. We are all experiencing that combined anticipation, slight alarm and hope for the day that is about to come. And that is a profoundly addictive experience that I don’t have when I watch a movie. And I need that, I need that feeling of, “we’re doing this together, we’ll watch this story unfold, and we will all feel something we don’t feel yet.”

Emmy: Yes. We are going through the ritual together. Night and day is a ritual to us. And we go through the ritual of the play even if we know the play, it will be a whole new event in that moment.

DR: And there’s something so magical about live theater, where people are standing in front of you, sometimes close enough to touch and they’re embodying that story again. And the play could run for months and every single performance is unique unto itself. 

And much like you were talking earlier about hand-made object as opposed to machine made objects. And a life play is a hand-made object and it’s unique onto itself in this moment right now.

Emmy: If you had a motto to tell others, what would it be?

DR: Stay curious. I’ve been thinking about curiosity a lot lately. I tend towards gloom, personal gloom. And in these rather challenging times, I’m trying to maintain a positive attitude. And I find that curiosity is the best tool I can use to stay out of my gloomy head and stay interested in an ever-changing world.

So. I find that curiosity is what is doing me the best right now.

Emmy: Debora Rosenberg, thank you so much for being with me today.

DR: It was my profound pleasure.