Blair Thompson

In addition to all the normal alterations I did for Brandywine Ballet Company's 2017 production of The Nutcracker, the biggest (in every sense of the word) project that I worked on was Mother Ginger. Less than a week before tech-week began, it became clear that our new Mother Ginger dress that we got the year before was not wearable because the massive PVC pipe understructure for the dress had been destroyed in the process of loading the truck once the show had finished. So the artistic director gave me the task of trying to figure out a new understructure for either our new dress or our old one. My solution was to create a fabric channel and attach it to the inside of the dress, then feed fibre glass poles through it, like you would with a tent. This massively reduced the weight of the finished costume and provided more movement for the costume, making it much more manageable and much safer for the dancer playing Mother Ginger, who wears painter's stilts underneath the costume. The new dress wasn't made symmetrically and was twice as heavy as the old dress, so my solution didn't work for that. We then tried it on our old dress and had overwhelming success.

 

Once that was done, I had to reconfigure the door mechanism in the front of the dress. Luckily it was still partially in tact, so I just have to figure out how the rope was threaded into the metal loops on the inside of the door. I also replaced the pipe at the bottom of the door with a light, but strong, thin metal rod. It cut down on a bit more weight, making it safer for the kids to pass under and cutting down on more weight for the dancer wearing the dress. Then with only two days until our photographer was coming in for pictures, the artistic director gave me free reign to add lighter, pastel trims and decorations to our dark, old dress to bring it into the color palette of our production. Both the artistic director and I were thrilled with the final look of the dress.