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Costume Design for Dance (some notes for designers and their employers) by Sabado Lam

I have been fortunate in my experience to have seen a great deal of dance before I was ever asked to design for dance. I will try to give a basic outline of how I work through my design process so that choreographers and designers may have a guide as to how to put their ideas together. Of course, each project must be approached with some degree of individuality, so not all works will follow the same route in their development.

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The “Stripper” Who Won an Oscar by Judith Lynne Hanna, PhD

Among the nominees for the Academy Awards in 2008, guess whose former profession was mentioned at the Awards show? Jon Stewart, holding forth as show host, declared that the writer of the movie "Juno" (29 year-old Diablo Cody) was a former exotic dancer. Why did he mention her former profession? Cody won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Is being an exotic dancer relevant to her achievement? Perhaps exotic dance has something to do with screen-writing?

Asides

• I was just following some thoughts around the web and came across this, which to me bears on the feature post (above) by Judith Hanna, and prior posts I've written on the same subject. Here it is, from Virginia Woolf: "When a subject is highly controversial — and any question about sex is that — one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker." #
• I was reading ArtsJournal.com just now and saw this from the Guardian (Uk): "Neither the Royal Ballet nor the English National Ballet currently employs a single black ballerina. The path to ballet stardom is generally easier for black men than women: black men are considered well built for lifts and pas de deux work. Just 10 dancers in the Royal Ballet's 98-strong company are not white - of those, only four are black, and all of them, like Acosta, are male. At ENB, just eight out of 71 dancers are not white. Only one is black, and he is also male." You can see the whole article here. It reminded me of the Bourgeon article looking at the difference between the treatment of men and women as choreographers. You can see that here -Rob #
• I've been thinking about funding recently. I've got some grants in now, and more going in. So I'm thinking about how art occasionally has to challenge things. If funders don't on a regular basis fund things that they're embarassed later that they've funded, then they're funding mediocrity. In art it is necessary to fund things that are risky. When one hires employees, certain preferences are reasonable. I would hire the sure-thing acceptable over the possibly great, possibly terrible. But in art, we must hire/fund the edges. Art, by necessity, by form, occasionally challenges. And if artists aren't encouraged to fuck it up, they will stay safe. Cause we really do need funding. #