#rwcmd

[asat3683]

👀 Michael Sheen will be performing in Cardiff on February 27th, 2022.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jacqueline Houston (@tiger_orgasm)

More info here:

Margins to Mainstream with Michael Sheen | Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama

[alleiramagic]

Grimm Tales Production Week 6 - Seeing the Final Show and Get Out!

Royal Welsh College Music & Drama MA Design for Performance

The final week working on Grimm, was truthfully, the easiest one so far - due to the nature of the show, all the actors never came offstage and there were no quick changes for us to deal with as dressers. Therefore, I could arrange the schedule so only two of us had to be on each night, and nobody had to work both the matinee and the evening show. I also made sure there were three of us for the first and last nights, so everything kicked off smoothly and we could start preparing for the get out.

The main assistant tasks pre-show were hair and makeup - Lila had her hair in french braids with two smaller plaits on either side, which either I or Layla did as we had the most hair experience; the ASMs also needed eyeliner moustaches. We also had to hand over Jerome and Seb’s smoking caps to the ASMs each night, as they wore them at the beginning and end of the show and were kept on the props table. The ASMs made this much easier on us after the third show by bringing in a props box for the actors to put any leftover props in after.

There were three major emergencies in the middle of shows that we handled well - Lila’s skirt tearing near the hem, Alex’s shoe sole coming apart, and Seb’s left trouser hem falling down. We sewed together Lila and Seb’s hems between shows, while for Alex we had to tape the boot together for the second act and source a replacement pair for the next evening. We were split across the millinery workshop on Monday-Thursday, so we stayed on top of laundry with whoever was in university during the day putting the shirts, tablecloths and socks/tights on to wash and tumble dry. 

Our get-out on Saturday was very successful - by storing the actors’ accessories in labelled plastic bags, they kept track of their costumes during the performances and there was only one sock we couldn’t find on the final day. This was also when the digital Costume Bible came in handy, as I was late coming in on Saturday; but Arianna accessed and printed of the BCS Hires Description List I’d already made earlier and the others could crack on with organising costumes without my presence. After bagging up the costumes, we took any extra university items back to underseating and the makeup cupboards, cleared and swept the dressing room, and added any final receipts and schedules to the bible folder.

[alleiramagic]

Grimm Tales Production Week 5 - Intense Tech Days

Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama MA Design for Performance

We went into tech for Grimm Tales on Tuesday 30th November, with three full-on days from 9am-10pm scheduled, as well as two dress runs. I’d previously created the schedule for the assistants across these days, working around an Opera Meet and Greet that myself and the MA1s had to attend on Tuesday evening, as well as Arianna’s tech sessions for the other two shows. This made the intense few days a bit easier to handle, as we all had an opportunity to sleep in at least once after a late evening - I even took a small nap myself on Thursday afternoon before going into the first dress run (pictured above)!

Tuesday and Wednesday of tech were mainly taken up with finishing off the Thousandfurs coat, which I already covered in a previous post. During the Thousandfurs tech on Tuesday, Izzy was clearly struggling to do up the front of the ballgowns with the hook and eye tape - so the next day Hazel and Katie had to remove them again and go back to using the stronger magnets we’d ordered. There were a few essential jobs we had to attend to throughout the tech period; namely, we had to arrive between 8:30-8:45am to open the dressing room for the actors, and also at least one assistant had to be in the theatre during the tech sessions to make notes on anything we’d missed in the production weeks or needed last minute changes.

This included sourcing and adjusting new waistcoats for the ASMs, who were meant to be dressed as waiters when they came onstage to move set pieces - we pulled the smallest black waistcoats we could find from Wardrobe, then took in the sides on all of them and slip stitched the lining back in place. Jerome’s trousers also lost 3 buttons in the first days of tech, so I had to sew these back on on Thursday. Finally, we experimented with some “dead” makeup for the band, who were meant to be the Grimms’ dead relatives: as seen above, we tried something in the way of hollow cheekbones, but after the first dress on Thursday decided against doing any makeup at all.

[alleiramagic]

Grimm Tales Production Week 5 - Thousandfurs Coat Make

Royal Welsh College Music & Drama MA Design for Performance

Finishing the coat in the last few days of production was definitely a group effort - Katie worked on the hood over the weekend, while Arianna continued gluing and tacking down the pieces of fur to the body pattern pieces. On Monday we had a fitting arranged with Izzy at 1:30, so Katie spent the morning sewing the pattern pieces together in preparation. The bottom hem and sleeve hems were left raw, and we pinned the sleeves to the correct length in the fitting. We also only tacked the hood on for the fitting; overall however, the coat fit very well and although heavy, left Izzy with enough flexibility to move and run around in. I also sewed in the coat hook and eye at the neck this afternoon - which I later learnt from Hazel I’d sewn in backwards, while taught me the correct way to insert a hook and eye!

The next day, the first day of tech, Jac the director asked for the coat to be backstage by 2pm, so we had Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning to machine the sleeve hems in, machine the outer hood onto the shoulders and then slip stitch the hood lining in. Katie did this first task on Monday afternoon while Ari and I went into town to get more tights for the female characters; then I dealt with the hood on Tuesday morning. When the coat was onstage on Tuesday, it was immediately obvious Izzy was struggling with the length when they had to run upstairs, so we agreed with Lucy and Jac to shorten it to ankle length. Arianna and I shortened this on Wednesday evening; and I spent most of Wednesday filling in the gaps of fur around the shoulders and seams, and tacking down any previously glued bits that had started to coming away during tech.

It was a long and arduous task to complete, but once we saw the coat on Izzy onstage we were so happy and satisfied with the end result!

[alleiramagic]

Grimm Tales Production Week 4 - Quick Alterations and the Final Push

Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama MA Design for Performance

We’d tried to avoid coming in on the weekends for the first few weeks of production, but we had no choice for the last weekend before tech week; the fur coat still needed finishing and there were a few other small alterations needed. To keep ourselves on track, I had arranged a costume assistants’ Meeting at 2pm on Thursday, where we drew up a schedule of assigned tasks (see above). We also had to chase up some aprons that had been ordered on Monday, which Layla did, as Arianna needed to break them down before the first tech day on Tuesday. In hindsight, I’m very glad I did this as I was starting to panic about getting all our work done before the tech; and since I also fell ill the next day and couldn’t come in, I was comfortable knowing everyone had jobs to do while I wasn’t there.

When I was feeling better on Sunday, I came in to do the few small fixes left - Lila and Izzy’s skirts needed ribbon trims added to the waistbands, as well as pockets inserted into the side for props to be stored. We had also rented an embroidered waistcoat from Bristol that was torn on the right armpit, and Allie had given it to me to fix a week earlier. To do this, I used black stayflex to hold the torn pieces together, and then slip stitched a black patch of fabric over the top to protect it from tearing further. On Sunday, I also started drawing up a schedule for the assistants over the three tech days, so none of us would be working the full 11 hours each day and ensured we’d all get some good rest before the show started.

[alleiramagic]

Grimm Tales Production Week 4 - Thousandfurs Coat Make

Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama MA Design for Performance

The last big make we had for Grimm Tales was a patchwork fur coat for the story Thousandfurs. In the fairytale, the princess asks her father to gift her a coat made from the pelts of a thousand animals from the kingdom, and later runs away to live in another castle and is given the nickname Thousandfurs because of this coat. This meant it was a very important piece to the show, and we knew we had to get it perfect. During Week 3, we tested out some different ways of arranging the fur to imitate Lucy’s design drawing (seen above), and she went down to London to source some fur from shops and her home to supplement the bits we already had in costume. The maker Katie drafted the coat from a basic square pattern, added triangular panels to widen the hem and a custom hood with boning to sit in a way that would hang over Izzy’s face. We also faced a challenge with this make to only use faux fur, as the actor was vegetarian and wouldn’t wear any real fur.

This week then, Katie cut out the coat pattern pieces from a thick green cotton drill, that we used as the base to attach the fur pieces to. Arianna and I were in charge of doing the fur - on Wednesday we started with the smallest pieces, the sleeves, so it would be less daunting as we figured out how we’d do it. We used reference images of small animal pelts to imitate the shape of a skinned animal, which Ari cut out from the back of the fabric using a scalpel to avoid cutting the actual fur. While they cut out, I arranged the larger pieces on both sleeves and then filled the gaps with leftover, smaller pieces; my goal was to pin the pieces down with lumps and folds in places, as well as some edges hanging off the fabric, to further add to the realism of a hand sewn fur coat. We also repurposed the pieces we’d cut for the samples, so nothing was wasted in the process. For the sleeves, we tacked down the edges of the fur scraps with thick doubled polyester thread. We also had to leave a few inches of fur overhang on the hems, but avoid the seam allowances, in order to make sure the finish would be perfect.

On Thursday we did much the same process with the two front panels of the coat, placing the larger “pelts” first then filling in gaps. We started tacking by hand again, but after around two hours our hands were aching and we had only done a corner of the large pattern pieces. I was starting to worry about getting the coat done in time, knowing we only had until the first tech on Tuesday, and the pieces still needed to be sewn together and finished. Then I had a brainwave - gluing the bulk of the fur down using fabric glue and PVA, and finishing using hand sewing to secure. I checked with Lucy, the designer, and Allie to make sure this would be a suitable replacement for sewing, and with their approval I tested this on a small piece first to make sure it would work. Then Ari and I got cracking on gluing the rest of the pieces down on the front, which only took us two hours to do, and even started on the larger back pieces by the time we left around 8pm on Thursday!

Sadly, I woke up in the early hours of Friday with badly blocked sinuses and flu-like symptoms, so had to call in sick that day. I was even more glad then that I’d come up with the gluing idea, as this made it a lot easier for Ari to continue doing the coat by herself on Friday and Saturday.

[alexmilledge]

Squirrel in Action - Final Puppet

After the R&D, and having actually puppeteered the puppets, there were lots of tweaks and final additions to be made. 

For squirrel, I added padding to the outside of its legs to give it a rounder shape and then covered with the same style collaged fabric as the body. The squirrel puppet made very loud noises when its legs hit the floor so i also added padding to the base of the puppets feet. After a bit more playing around and rehearsal I realised that the noise was not coming from the puppets feet but from the base of the legs hitting the wood and so I added extra padding there too and that made significant difference to the noise. 

I padded the arms with some wadding and covered them with the same fabric ‘skin’ and created a warbler tube for the back of the arms to sit in which meant they were able to move up and down freely still. 

I added more fabric to the tail so that it was bushier and some whiskers using the broom bristles from the earlier spine experiment. 

Below is the final puppet in action having just noticed the nut in the bird feeder! 🌰

[royalwelshdiversitysoc]

Podcasts to keep an eye on...

New National Theatre Podcast

About Race with Reni Eddo-Lodge

Making Theatre Podcast with lighting designer Prema Mehta

3ShotsOfTequila

Have You Heard George’s Podcast

Unravel Podcast