'Wire and Ice' dresses with screen tutus and headdress
The theme of this year's
Manifest Spectacle was dreams. This gave us a lot of room to design some really creative costumes! Our line up included three 5 foot diameter floating jelly fish, over-sized animals being lead on a leash by children, businessmen with tentacles for feet and hands, and many others.
'Trashabethans' in the parade line upWithin the theme of dreams we wanted to use reusable materials. We used trash bags as the fabric of our
Trashabethan costumes. We created our trash bag fabric by adhering trash bags to a muslin backing. The hoop skirts, bustles, panniers, and women's headdresses have a chicken wire and bamboo understructure and are tagged with strips of trash bag. Despite the wire and wood understructure, these costumes are very light and manageable. The men's epaulettes are made in a similar style. The ruffs were made with old Manifest fliers from years past.
The Trashabethan men wore chicken wire and mache deer head mounted on bicycle helmets.
My design sketch of the 'Trashabethan Deer Head Men'
I designed costumes for Collaboraction for the BizBash Chicago Launch Party. BizBash is an event design publication and they've just opened a Chicago section on their website. The event was all white.
We performed a flash mob dance piece to Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet" (click here for Bjork's music video), the same dance piece as at After Dark at the Art Institute - Ed Ruscha. The main difference was in the costumes. I had dressed the After Dark dancers as 1960s gas station attendants - for BizBash the dancers were dressed as the caterers, cooks, and waiters at the event, all in white. There was also a core group of five performers dressed as angelic guests. They created a tableaux at the main entrance.
