…fibre meets theatre.
So, here I am, deep in my final production of the season. Just over a year past when I first started working with Theatre Orangeville.
These last two shows have been a bit confusing, with an overlap in the middle, as one was finishing and one was starting. I had to have two separate lists of what I was doing, and sometimes, even following one list can be brain-exploding!
This last show is a world premiere of a new Norm Foster work. (I even googled Norm Foster. I knew he was a good playwright, I hadn’t realized how “up there” he was in Canadian theatre!) So, this show I even did designs sketches for. (Though, with TO, sketches become limiting very quickly!) It’s mostly a bought show. I shopped for bits and pieces and put together my looks for the characters, since it’s happening “here and now”. There’s one character, though, which runs through the entire play (well, actually it’s all interwoven and linked), and he’s an aging shock rocker: Tommy Quick.
So, he got to be something I could create and build, and he’s been evolving over the entire production period. Originally the director suggested Mick Jagger or Keith Richards, but that quickly changed into something closer to Alice Cooper, or Kiss, and now includes a bit of Marilyn Manson.
My actor is already 6’2”, and I’ve given him boots that started with a big heavy sole, and have had 2 ½ further inches added. And he’s in black. Stretchy black. And then, of course, he needed some kind of leathery jock strap. Which is actually made of a rubber-like spandex, and decorated with glittery red flames. But it needed padding.
And of course, I’d taken all the quilt batting and fibrefill back to the theatre shop. And I wasn’t really in the mood to take a 50-minute drive over there to get it. What to do?
I thought about taking some of my unspun wool. After all, I’ve used it for other weird purposes before. And I’d built a beard a year ago, for Merlin, out of flax roving hand-knotted to lace…. But as I rummaged around, I found one last solitary bag of bearded collie. (A previous boss had asked me to spin up her dog, and for all the time I worked with her, had regularly dropped off small bags of Cara on my desk. Actually lovely hair. Incredibly clean. Even the cats weren’t particularly interested. Quite flyaway for spinning, though. Not something to work with outdoors on a breezy day!)
So, anyway, there was this last small bag of dog fur. And it amused me, since my shock rocker’s costume also incorporated varying choke chains and leashes from the dollar store.
We had a day or two of amusement amongst the techs, deciding which breed would have been more appropriate, a Great Dane, or any small lapdog. But a day later I noticed that even through the rubber spandex, all the sharp little guard hairs were escaping. And at a high speed! How amazing!
Well, I couldn’t really imagine asking stage management to miracle brush him down each night, so I switched that padding for some gorgeous silky acrylic waste I’d bought years ago near Manchester. (Really must try spinning that again. It was fun two decades ago when I first tried it.)
So, I guess it was me, who let the dogs out.
Note: it was felting up beautifully, even in a day or two, and probably would have stopped shedding in another day or two. But maybe I’ll try making some fur felt insoles out of the last of it….
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